it seems like moons ago when women were best known for tak­ing care of chil­dren, cook­ing meals, clean­ing dishes, doing house chores, vac­u­um­ing… and although i’m sure we — and i use the term ‘we’ very loosely here — still do these things quite well, we have made huge progress in the work­force the last few decades.

it came as no sur­prise to me when the rock­e­feller foundation’s (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with time) recent study on gen­der issues showed that amer­i­can women have become dom­i­nant in soci­ety and that they would soon con­sti­tute a major­ity of the work­force. fur­ther­more, the results showed that they earned 57% of col­lege degrees and made 75% of all buy­ing deci­sions in the home.

other note­wor­thy statistics:

• today, 57% of col­lege stu­dents are women, com­pared to 43% in 1972
• today, 71% of women with chil­dren under 18 years of age are in the labor force, com­pared to 47% in 1975
• today, 32% of lawyers are women, com­pared to 3% in 1970
• today, 28% of med­ical doc­tors are women, com­pared to 8% in 1970

although these num­bers are nice to see, there still exist many inequal­i­ties between the two gen­ders, namely salaries. regard­less of the titles and posi­tions that women hold, their pay — today and most prob­a­bly for years to come — is still less than that of men’s. in 2008, women earned $0.77 for every $1 men earned. don’t get me wrong, i’m not going on a fem­i­nist rant here, for i can assure you that i am not an avid sup­porter of com­plete equal rights; on the con­trary, i think men should assume cer­tain things that women shouldn’t — but that’s just my per­sonal opinion.

in any case, i will stop here and direct you to the exten­sive and fas­ci­nat­ing piece that inspired this post — “the state of the amer­i­can woman” — it mainly focuses on the land­mark study (con­ducted by the rock­e­feller foun­da­tion) of gen­der issues to assess how indi­vid­ual amer­i­cans are react­ing.  the arti­cle was pub­lished in the octo­ber 14, 2009 issue of time.com. you can read the full story here.

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