Working Women
You don’t have to look hard to find articles discussing unshattered glass ceilings, gender pay gaps, age/gender/race inequities along with other discouraging facts surrounding women’s careers and success. But thankfully, this isn’t one of those articles. Here at The It Crowd Marketing, we like to look at the positive and focus on how we can be even better, not on what’s holding us back.
Lucky for us, there’s no singular definition of what a working woman is. She could be a corporate CEO and founder like our own Lindsey Harrison, or she could be the Uber driver that picked you up last weekend, she could be raising 3 boys under the age of 10 and teaching English online at nights to foreign students, or maybe she just enjoys working from her couch in her sweatpants running her own lifestyle company. The point being, in our digital age, there are no strict definitions that we must fit ourselves into which means that all obstacles standing in our path may slow us down but won’t block us from our goal.
If you’re skeptical that households are looking different every day with the women becoming the breadwinners, take a look at these encouraging stats:
- Women are earning degrees at 4 times the rate that we used to. While 34% of women have earned a bachelor’s degree by age 29, only 26% of men have done the same. Additionally, the number of women in the labor force who had earned college degrees has nearly quadrupled since 1970.
- According to KPMG’s Women’s Study Report, 69% of women are willing to proactively ask to be involved in a project while 66% are willing to take on a project that is new to them.
- A report completed in 2018, McKinsey and LeanIn’s Women in The Workplace, showed that women negotiate their salaries more than men do. While 29 percent of men had negotiated for raises, 31 percent of women did the same in the past 2 years.
- The Department of Labor indicates that 82% of social workers are women. In fact, women represent the majority of speech-language pathologists with 98%, physical therapists with 69%, and pharmacists with 60%.
- Three out of 10 women veterans will continue to serve their country as a government worker after leaving the military.
- 70% of mothers with children under the age of 18 participate in the labor force with 75% of working mothers maintaining full-time status.
- In 1960, the number of mothers being the primary, or sole earners, of households was only at 11%, today it stands at 40% (The Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau).
- Possibly our favorite stat – Between 1997 and 2014, the total number of women-owned businesses in the United States increased by 68 percent.
- Women are enjoying their work! Forbes reports that while 33% of women have reported that they are engaged in their work, only 28 percent of men can say the same. However, while women are happy at work, studies done by Career Contessa show that 70% of the total women surveyed are looking for new opportunities.
Women have a louder voice now than ever before and it’s not going to be muted any time soon! Maybe that’s why companies such as Visa are starting to take note and listen to what those voices are saying. As a primarily run female business, It Crowd want to help be part of this change as well. We want to celebrate the wins that women everywhere are achieving and remember how unstoppable we all are!
By: Miranda Hardesty Hoffpauir
