The topic of one panel discussion at the recently held Lider conference Women in Business was: Are there male and female jobs?, while another panel discussion dealt with the well-known ‘glass ceiling’.
However, these two topics are not so different as behind male/female jobs lies another glass barrier – the ‘glass elevator’. In the world, and also here, industries dominated by women are education, healthcare, social care, and service activities. In all other sectors, men dominate. According to a New York Times study, in the last 10 years, men have increasingly entered industries dominated by women in search of greater job security and better work-life balance.
And here the phenomenon of the ‘glass elevator’ occurs: men advance much faster, some invisible elevator lifts them up the hierarchical ladder. Additionally, on average, they are paid much more than women in the mentioned industries. Caren Goldberg from the American Kogod School of Business researched this phenomenon and found that men, for example, make up less than five percent of employees in American healthcare, but their share is much larger in managerial positions.
