Mom Battles Gender Inequality

By NICOLE SHANLEY

Amanda Fichera, owner of two newly opened businesses in Harrington Park, New Jersey, as well as the mother of two children,  is the perfect example of a powerful women battling inequality in the workplace.  However,  each day Fichera is proving all of the discriminatory stereotypes wrong.

As an entrepreneur and the mother of a three-year-old son and a nine-month-old daughter, Fichera, refuses to let her responsibilities slack, both at home and in the workplace.

She is among the working mothers who are doing more but earning less.

“It’s all about balance, women are just as capable as men.  This does not mean doing less at home with the kids, it’s all possible,” said Fichera.

For those supporting women, it is clear that Fichera is not the only capable women, in fact all women are.

In many societies, women have long been viewed as the inferior gender,  and this has transferred over into their discrimination and inequality in the workplace.

Even in today’s day and age,  women are making smaller salaries than their male counterparts.  For every $1 a man makes, women only make .78¢.

There are far more job opportunities available to men than women with the exact same education and qualifications.  Employers believe that women end up carrying nearly all of the care-giving responsibilities, putting them at a disadvantage to perform in the workplace while balancing this.

These people generally feel if women put more hours into household activities than men, they ultimately are less able to perform in the workplace.

Studies have shown that it is unrealistic to expect gender equality if workplaces demand that women be available all the time.  When over 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates were surveyed, a woman in her forties is reported saying “For me, at age 25, success was defined by career success. Now I think of success much differently: Raising happy, productive children, contributing to the world around me, and pursuing work that is meaningful to me.”  Basically, the second a woman has her first child, motherhood becomes her entire life, as expected.     

The cultural emphasis on being the ideal mother along with a corporate culture that demands long work hours makes motherhood very difficult for women with careers.  However, this is not necessarily true.  Even still, women earned 81 percent pay of what their male counterparts earned in 2010.

Just two years ago, Obama’s new equal-pay rules required all companies with 100 employees or more to disclose pay data broken down by race, gender and ethnicity.  In doing so, he hoped to out rule any discrimination, as well as close the gender pay gap.  This is still a work in progress.

As for Fichera, her seventeen hour work days have yet to stop her.  After getting up constantly throughout the night to meet the needs of her children, the official start to her day is around 6:00am.  From here, her day will then consist of carpooling to and from school, as well as running back and forth between both businesses until around 8:00pm or 9:00pm, seven days a week.

It is hard to imagine how she juggles it all, but she always finds a way.  “I never dreamt of success.  I worked for it” said Estee Lauder, a famous business woman born over a century ago, but whose products are still popular today.

“If mothers could put half as much effort into a career as they do at home and fight for what they believe in, equal pay will come along with it,” says Fichera.

For more information visit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-30/gender-inequality-in-the-workplace-what-data-analytics-says.