Who is career woman

If you are planning a girls night out after work, a simple wardrobe change can turn you from career woman to party girl. It targets the career woman and also offers quality casual clothing.

The best way to determine what are considered current women's business fashions is to browse high-end shops that cater to the career woman. Among ultra-achievers, a quarter are away on business at least five nights every three months. According to research by sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, the percentage of women working at least 50 hours a week is now higher in the United States than in any other country.

Think of what a hour week means in terms of work-life balance. If you assume an hour lunch and a minute round-trip commute the national average , the workday stretches to almost 13 hours. Take Sue Palmer, 49, managing director of Grant Thornton, the London-based global accounting firm, and the only woman on its management committee.

The reasons for this go back to when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which institutionalized the hour work-week and required employers to pay overtime for additional hours worked. One provision, however, exempted managers and professionals and still does. For those workers, extra hours carry no marginal costs to employers.

Responding were 1, high-achieving career women ages 28 to 55; high-achieving, noncareer women ages 28 to 55; and high-achieving men ages 28 to The group of ultra-achieving men was not large enough to disaggregate.

The sample was drawn from the Harris Poll on-line database of cooperative respondents. Corporate women were defined as working in companies with more than 5, employees.

The two charts below contain some of the startling—and sobering—findings. Women pay an even greater price for those long hours because the early years of career building overlap—almost perfectly—the prime years of childbearing. As policy analyst Nancy Rankin points out, the career highway has all kinds of off-ramps but few on-ramps.

In fact, the persistent wage gap between men and women is due mainly to the penalties women incur when they interrupt their careers to have children.

In a recent study, economists Susan Harkness and Jane Waldfogel compared that wage gap across seven industrialized countries and found it was particularly wide in the United States. These days, only a small portion of this wage gap can be attributed to discrimination getting paid less for doing the same job or being denied access to jobs, education, or capital based on sex. It is because it has failed to develop policies—in the workplace and in society as a whole—that support working mothers.

Going back to the mid-nineteenth century, feminists in this country have channeled much of their energy into the struggle to win formal equality with men. More recently, the National Organization for Women has spent 35 years fighting for a wide array of equal rights, ranging from educational and job opportunities to equal pay and access to credit.

The idea is that once all the legislation that discriminates against women is dismantled, the playing field becomes level and women can assume a free and equal place in society by simply cloning the male competitive model. In Europe, various groups of social feminists have viewed the problem for women quite differently.

Rather, it is her dual burden—taking care of a home and family as well as holding down a job—that leads to her second-class status. Yes, these percentages have grown over the years—but not much. Thirty-nine percent of ultra-achieving women also feel this way, despite the fact that half of them are married to men who earn less than they do. So this is the difficult position in which women find themselves. Young women are told that a serious person needs to commit to her career in her 20s and devote all her energies to her job for at least ten years if she is to be successful.

Media hype about advances in reproductive science only exacerbates the problem, giving women the illusion that they can delay childbearing until their careers are well established. But sadly, new reproductive technologies have not solved fertility problems for older women. This kind of information is hard to come by because the infertility industry in this country likes to tout the good news—with dire consequences.

Too many career women put their private lives on the back burner, assuming that children will eventually happen for them courtesy of high-tech reproduction—only to discover disappointment and failure. They were quite prepared to shoulder more than their fair share of the work involved in having both career and family.

At the end of the day, women simply want the choices in love and work that men take for granted. Instead, they operate in a society where motherhood carries enormous economic penalties. Two recent studies lay out these penalties in very specific terms. In her study, economist Waldfogel finds that mothers earn less than other women do even when you control for marital status, experience, and education. Because, as a large body of research demonstrates, women are happier when they have both career and family.

In a series of books and articles that span more than a decade, University of Michigan sociologist Lois Hoffmann has examined the value of children to parents and finds that, across cultures, parents see children as enormously important in providing love and companionship and in warding off loneliness. Children also help parents deal with the questions of human existence: How do I find purpose beyond the self? How do I cope with mortality? Thus, the fact that so many professional women are forced to sacrifice motherhood is patently unfair, and it also has immense implications for American business, since it causes women intent on motherhood to cut short their careers.

This is, of course, the flip side of the same coin. For if a large proportion of women who stay on track in their careers are forced to give up family, an equally large proportion who opt for family are forced to give up their careers. The cost to corporations and to our economy becomes monumental in the aggregate. Our nation needs professional women to stay in the labor force; we can ill afford to have a quarter of the female talent pool forced out of their jobs when they have children.

What an extraordinary waste of expensively educated talent! Image credits. Word of the Day kind-hearted. About this. Blog Outsets and onsets! Read More. November 08, To top. Sign up for free and get access to exclusive content:.

I always wanted to have a career like his—except for the stopping work thing. The aged woman made no reply; her eyes still studied Ramona's face, and she still held her hand. There are three things a wise man will not trust: the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and woman's plighted faith. I find myself chained to the foot of a woman, my noble Cornelia would despise! Woman is mistress of the art of completely embittering the life of the person on whom she depends.