The point Arquette made isn't new (the top 10 highest paid Hollywood stars have been all men for ages) but the glitz and glamour of the Oscars have now made it the talk of the town. Consider her home country. It's well-known that for every dollar a man makes in the US, a woman earns just 78 cent for doing the same job. Catalyst, a US-based research group, has said it would take 70 years for there to be as many women as men on the boards of the largest US companies at the pace at which women are getting such positions.
India is no exception. A Business Standard Research Bureau study, published in the BS Weekend edition earlier this month, said there were only three women (two of them are promoters) in the list of the top 100 crorepati CEOs in the country for the 2014 calendar year. The reason is not difficult to find - researchers at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, found that female bosses in India earn a staggering 38.59 per cent less than their men counterparts.
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The situation is no better as you go down the ladder. According to a CII study, while there is a healthy ratio (16 per cent) of women managers in junior levels, they make up only 4 per cent of senior managerial posts. Further, only 1 per cent of the organisations have women CEOs.
The gender pay gap in the information technology (IT) industry is as high as 29 per cent. A report by Monster India found that a male IT worker received a gross salary of Rs 359.25 an hour, while a female worker received Rs 254.04 an hour. The revelation is startling in an industry where a third of the employees are women, showing how women employees in India are still fighting an uphill battle for equal pay for equal work, and women's employment is still heavily skewed towards low-paying, low-skilled dead-end jobs.
In that sense, a heartfelt plea from the podium on the Oscar night by people like Arquette may help nudge companies into treating women better, but there is another way of looking at it. It's equally important to highlight things women can do for themselves to improve their pay and career prospects.
There are examples galore of a majority of talented, highly educated women getting lost somewhere on the climb between the graduation podium and the C-suite. Quite a few of them go part-time or drop out of the workforce entirely because they find it hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours and the anytime, anywhere culture of senior corporate jobs.
With more number of career breaks in their job history, the negotiating capacity of women in the labour market declines. Hence, men with similar experience earn higher salary as compared to women.
Even the high-achieving women who want to return in full force once their maternity leave ends, often find the road back far more treacherous than they had anticipated, as positions disappear and salaries plummet. Human resources (HR) consultants also talk about the skewed business experience that women have. They are prominent in top staff jobs, such as head of HR, but still scarce in the line, or core-business, positions essential to the resume of any would-be CEO. There are innumerable examples of women who are willing to trade higher pay for jobs with regular hours, more comfortable conditions, little travel and so on.
A study at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business found that women MBAs were more likely than men to have taken time off from their careers, which can be a huge misstep for those aspiring to reach the pinnacle of corporate life.
Overall, there is no denying that there is still a general institutional bias against women, but blaming everything on a sexist economy that is bent on imposing a "gender tax" is only half the truth.