Women in 2016 are on a path to not only be professional but also to be treated the same as their male counterparts. With the need, now more than ever, to have gender equality in the workplace, Bloomberg Business released an article sharing that women can narrow that gender pay gap by going straight into the fields that are dominated by males. Some of those suggested professions are in the construction trades.
“Women are being excluded from higher-paying middle-skill jobs where they’d have a chance to earn a living wage,” said Program Director Ariane Hegewisch, Institute for Women’s Policy Research for employment and earnings and the lead author of the study. “Yet employers lack enough qualified workers to fill demand for some of these fast-growing better jobs.”
The article studies 473 occupations and of the middle-skilled positions (deemed as yielding $35,000 per year), women were only in about 150 of them. BloombergBusiness also claims that there are going to be more than 500,000 manufacturing job openings in the next decade. If women don’t start and act now to become trained in these positions, these are entire workforces that will continue to be dominated by men.
The article goes on to say “Overall, women’s median annual earnings have remained at about 20 percent below those of men for the past decade, government data show. The different jobs men and women hold account for more than half of this pay gap, according to researchers at Cornell University.”
Women, as well as men, can gain training and experience through an Apprenticeship program. With benefits like being paid to learn the material and not having to take out insurmountable student loans to increasing wages and continual professional training, many of ACT Ohio’s affiliates are looking to hire women.
