| From Technology Review July 1987 p49 of the alumni insert
Equality in Salary but Not in Price
Five years after graduating from the Sloan School of Management,
men and women master's students who have followed comparable careers
are earning comparable salaries. But to reach their positions,
say Professor Emerita Phyllis A Wallace and two Sloan School
colleagues, women MBAs pay a higher price than men.
Theri stress level is higher, and they have worked longer hours.
"Although female master's graduates can earn the same levels of
salary as men, they have to sacrifice more," say Wallace, Ming-Je
Tang, PhD '85, and Cathleen R Tilney, SM '82, in a report to the
Academy of Management.
Wallace and her colleagues sent questionaires to 322 graduates of
the Sloan master's program at four points along the first five years
of their post-management-school careers. One-third of the sample
were women, and all those queried received their SMa between 1975
and 1979. There were questions about salary, hours worked, amount
of travelling, marriage and children, job satisfaction, and the
nature of their mentoring by more senior colleagues and other
relationships in their companies.
Among the results:
� Men have better relationships with mentors (who are typically
male) then do women. Indeed, says the survey report, women "have
some difficulty describing what their mentors do for them."
� Women MBAs typically worked more hours per week (an average of
53.2) than their male counterparts (50.3 hours a week).
� Levels of responsibility, progress in the company heirarchy,
and rates of pay were essentially the same for men and women in
the same Sloan class.
� Nearly 60% of the women were married five years after leaving
the Sloan School, and nearly all of those had dual-career
relationships. In contrast, a higher percentage of the men were
married, but only 58% of those married said their wives were also
pursuing careers. Indeed, some of the men reported that they
deliberately selected as spouses women who had nine-to-five jobs
with little or no travel responsibilities, leading to dual-earner
rather than dual career relationships.
� Five years after graduating, some 60% of the women had no children.
Thus they still had to face "a major problem of meshing their personal
and career objectives," said Wallace and her colleagues -- another
possible source of both present and future stress.
A fall report of this study will appear later this year in a new
book by Wallace, "Upward Mobility of Young Managers," under the
Ballinger imprint.
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