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Updated Wednesday, July 14, 2010 10:59 am TWN, The China Post news staff

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Pay inequality still exists, but equalization is coming

Over the past decade, a sort of silent revolution has occurred, a change that perhaps warrants more media attention. In his best-selling 2007 book “Microtrends” Mark Penn, a pollster, political consultant and author explains that “women are on the verge of taking over word-based professions like journalism, law, marketing and communications.” In a book overflowing with statistics, Penn cites the United States Bureau of Labor as claiming that in the U.S. as of 2005 57 percent of news correspondents, reporters and news analysts were women. Once thought of as a definitively male role, the person sitting in the coveted news anchor chair is today probably a woman as 57 percent of U.S. TV anchors are now female.

More women are moving into positions of real power as well. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is one of the most powerful people in the world, but even in more traditionalist nations, women are ascending. The July 3rd inauguration of Roza Isakovna Otunbayeva as the new president of Kyrgyzstan marks the first time that nation — or any in the region — has had a woman leader. U.S. President Barack Obama recently nominated Elena Kagan to serve on the United States Supreme Court and she is currently undergoing confirmation hearings. In all probability, Kagan will be confirmed and will become the third woman justice on the bench joining Justice Sonya Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — the first time in U.S. history that three women have served concurrently.

If any are surprised by this fact, they really shouldn't be. As Mark Penn writes, “Since 1970, the number of women lawyers in America has grown 2,900 percent. Women are just over half of law school graduates and nearly half of law firm associates.” Taiwan is also seeing changes. The nation's Central News Agency reported last week that this year four female academics made it into Taiwan's top research institution, the Academia Sinica, the first time so many women had been inducted in a single year.

There's no getting around the fact that pay inequality still exists all around the world. But with women poised to take over the fields of law, journalism, publishing and even marketing, the planet seems to be heading towards some over-due equalization. We are not going to upend thousands of years of inequality overnight, but the progress that is being made is worth celebrating.

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