Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips
Job-hunting tips from the September 10, 2001 issue of QuintZine.
Once again, an article aimed at employers offers riches
for job-seekers in under-represented groups. In an article
aimed at increasing diversity hiring, WetFeet offers a listing
of sites where employers can find minority candidates. You can
bet that if employers are being told to recruit at these sites,
job-seekers would do well to post resumes on these job banks.
See WetFeet's article.
Business Week Online recently interviewed Ella L.J. Edmondson
Bell and Stella M. Nkomo, authors of Our Separate Ways: Black
and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity
(Harvard Business School Press, August, 2001), about the differences
between professional black women and white women. The authors
based their findings on an eight-year research project that
included 120 in-depth interviews and a national survey of black
and white female managers, many holding senior positions at top
U.S. companies. Some key distinctions:
White women often align themselves more closely with
their male colleagues rather than with the black females
in their organizations.
Women are still not seen as authority figures. Women, and
black women in particular, are seen more in subservient
roles or working in more traditional fields, such as teaching school.
The black women studied didn't feel that they had to submerge
who they were to get ahead, while the white women felt
that they had to totally acquiesce, to give in and be like one
of the boys to advance their careers.
The "sassy, but refined" posture that many black women adopt, the
authors say, can sometimes backfire when it's seen as anger and
unwillingness to be a team player.
Black women's performance often has to be beyond what anyone
would ever expect, for it to even be accepted as OK.
Black women see racism in the workplace so frequently that they've
come to expect it.
The white woman is the new gatekeeper in deciding who moves up
and who doesn't.
Black women have a tendency to be much more collective
in their approaches, while white women tend to be highly individualistic.
The experience of all women trying to climb the corporate ladder is
not the same across racial lines. Gender makes a big difference,
but race makes a tremendous difference.
It's not a big surprise, but according to
techies.com, women are under-represented in terms
of salaries in the tech realm. A techies.com study found
that women in technology jobs earn 92 percent of
what their male peers make, but greater disparities
still exist in relation to higher management
positions in the IT sector.
Of the 106,133 technology workers studied, women
earned an average of $5,000 less than men. The
study found that women in high-tech jobs earned
nearly the same amount as men for the first five
years of employment. The gap was smallest for
professionals in the software engineering and
software development fields.
In hot jobs like data management, however, the job
salary did not match the demand; women earned
just 84 percent of male earnings, which equals an
average salary difference of $12,500.
The biggest salary gap for women was in marketing
and human resources. Female marketers earned
$7,900 less than males, while female human
resource managers earned $11,300 less than
their male counterparts. For experienced female
project managers, the salary difference was as high
as 16 percent.
According to the National Committee on Pay and
Equity, women just aren't getting the kind of
promotions at the same rate as men and don't
move into the IT managerial positions as quickly.
Once again, an article aimed at employers offers riches
for job-seekers in under-represented groups. In an article
aimed at increasing diversity hiring, WetFeet offers a listing
of sites where employers can find minority candidates. You can
bet that if employers are being told to recruit at these sites,
job-seekers would do well to post resumes on these job banks.
