Blog #36

I am optimistic than women can break through the glass ceiling however I realize that it will take some time. I agree that women have made significant strides academically but in order to achieve equality in the workplace and be able to complete for higher wages there will need to be more women in positions of leadership. With that said, I think colleges need to improve their efforts in focusing on the challenges that women face and prepare female students to overcome those barriers. Although women continue to excel academically and prove that they are equally as competent as their male counterparts, unless this can translate into opportunities in the work place, we will not be able to get very far. In order to be able to enter the workplace with a stellar resume and climb up the corporate latter, it is necessary that the organizations have flexible and family friendly policies so that opportunities for women do not escape them otherwise it’ll continue to be a resemblance of the race between the turtle and the hare. While the turtle eventually reached the finish line, it required more time and effort to get there as the odds were against the turtle. Right now, policies in male dominated fields are set in a manner that they limit opportunity to women. One could argue that those rules are in fact discriminatory because it is clear that working women with familial obligations face greater challenges and if those responsibilities outside of the job are not considered to be legitimate then policies will never change. I think that we need to first recognize that housework, care giving responsibilities, raising children and everything else we women do are challenging tasks. Furthermore, if we work in addition to what we do at home, we should be commended but this rarely occurs. If we defined women’s work as what it is: hard work then I think policies in corporate America are more likely to change and become flexible in order to welcome more women into professions that men have long dominated.