Knocking on the glass ceiling

Aja Kelleher is not an aggressive woman. Ambitious and assertive, yes. But aggressive is a bit harsh even though many men would, perhaps, paint her with that brush as she pushed her way up the corporate ladder as a woman and a minority in a field that is heavy with white men. Standing out and standing up for herself has served her well. More than 15 years of hard work have propelled Kelleher into a post as senior project manager for the Chicago office of a large investment firm making in the neighborhood of $100,000.

Now, 43, Kelleher’s career began at Motorola, headquartered just outside Chicago, as a data analyst pulling in $32,000. That was 1994, and when people would call in for IT help and get her on the phone, the female voice seemed to turn them off; they would often ask to speak with someone else (i.e., a man).

But Kelleher refused to transfer them. She pushed back. She couldn’t divulge the name of the company, which is privately held, and Kelleher said it has a policy prohibiting her from disclosing her exact salary. Still, Kelleher said pay typically ranges from $80,000 to $115,000 for managers at her level.

Not bad. But at times in her career Kelleher discovered that men were earning more and heard justifications like, “He has a family to support.” At points in her career, Kelleher says, she learned that men were earning about 20 percent more than her. This disparity mirrors national data that shows women earn 78 cents for every dollar that men make.

And race factors heavily into the earnings’ equation. Kelleher is a Korean-American, which puts her in the lucky demographic of women to command a higher salary. Asian-American women, for example, typically out-earn white women, while African-American and Hispanic women earn far less. But that’s only against other women. Against white men, she trails, and has felt added pressure to prove herself because hiring quotas based on race and gender made colleagues skeptical of her ability.

“The first thing they think is ’What does she know?’ or ’Is she as good?’ or ’Is she as smart?’ as if gender has an IQ,” Kelleher said.

Kelleher’s field of networking is an especially masculine segment of IT, entailing heavy lifting and installing large equipment such as computer servers. Even so, women are entering the field now in numbers far above the levels of 1994, when Kelleher was starting out and it was typical for the ratio to come in at one woman to every 10 men.

Never shy, Kelleher speaks out when she discovers she is being paid less than her male counterparts. But for all of her passion about the issue, it’s still not enough to shield her from the negative reality of the wage gap between men and women. The fact remains that even in specialized fields like, Kelleher’s, which is computer and math heavy, a woman’s median salary lags a man’s by some $10,000, according to data from the most recent U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

 Her challenges are part of a national picture where — despite great strides for gender equality since the 1970s — women are still paid a fraction of what most men make. There are exceptions. Plenty of them.

But on the whole, women earn far less than men and minorities’ take is almost embarrassingly low. For Hispanic women with full-time employment, the median annual earnings is $26,612, or about 58 percent of the $46,008 that white men earn. And for African-American women, the average earnings is $31,009, or 67 percent of the median earnings of white men.

When taking on an issue as complicated as the wage gap — one that has remained stubborn despite the gains made by women, despite the loud voices of protest and even lawsuits that would seem, at a blush, to erase any distinction — much can be learned from a woman like Kelleher. Speaking with experts in various fields can clarify issues around and within the gender gap, such as sexism, the role of ethnicity, advice for young women starting their careers and what the future holds for this stubborn inequality between the genders.

Midge Wilson, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, explains that one of the factors behind the wage gap is occupational segregation. Female-dominated professions, or “pink-collar” jobs, typically pay less than male-dominated fields and this perpetuates the wage gap.

Christine Williams, a professor of sociology at University of Texas at Austin, has been studying race and gender issues in the workplace for about 30 years. She explains some other factors behind the wage gap including the burden of sexual harassment and even housework.

“So even when women work full time and year-round, they still are burdened by extra domestic responsibilities that men don’t have, and that plays a part in them clustering in certain kinds of occupations and also limits their mobility in the labor force,” Williams said.

“Finally, we talk about discrimination and sexual harassment, which are factors that explain why sometimes even when men and women work in the same jobs, women are sometimes less many than men simply because employers don’t think that women are worth as much as men are, or because they are subjected to sexual harassment on the job which impedes women’s opportunities compared to men.”