the upper levels of management will be examined. Examples will be presented which will illustrate how women have failed to attain the higher positions which would be commensurate with their education and experience. In addition, this paper will present a few possible explanations for gender discrimination against women in America.
Many years have passed since the Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed for incorporation into the U.S. Constitution. In the time that has passed since then, discrimination against women is still prevalent in most professions. And where gender discrimination is concerned, women are the ones who suffer the most. In fact, in most fields, women are concentrated at the bottom of the ranks (Burton 18). The same holds true for women in top level management: many more men hold top management positions than women. Also, there is still a huge pay gap between what male managers are paid and what female managers are paid, and although women's salaries have improved over the last decade, in general, pay increases for women are "an upstream swim in a dwindling river" (Burton 20).
Unfortunately, woman who have earned a postgraduate degree in business still have no guarantee that they will succeed in the future at the highest levels of corporate management. A dramatic example of this fact is the fate of the first eight women to graduate from Harvard Business School in 1965. Of those eight women, only two followed a traditional business career path and one of those two died. The one who remained experienced discrimination on account of her gender, despite the fact that she graduated from one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. Upon graduation, she had yet to receive any job offers, and she got her first position as an investment banker through the help of a friend (Linden 95-96).
Statistics show that while 43 percent of managers in this country are women, female managers account for ...