US Women, Ambitious but Overqualified and Underpaid
Female workers in the US are overqualified in underpaid jobs. Working women with children say they have less career opportunities than their male spouses.
Working
women in the US
say they contribute more to the household than men, when they live as couples.
The difference becomes larger when a couple has children. Women with children
find it more difficult to combine work and family than those without. More
women than men start to work part-time because they want to take care of the
children. Women with children say they have less career opportunities compared
to men with children.
This
picture emerges from an international comparison of the factors influencing
women’s decisions to work, involving 43 countries. The findings are based
on a sample of 345,000 data collected by WageIndicator online surveys in 2008
and the first quarter of 2009 in those 43 countries. The data was analyzed by
Income Data Services, the British research partner of WageIndicator, on behalf
of ITUC, the International Trade Union Confederation. The results are published
on March 8, international women’s day.
The
main overall findings of the ITUC-report are that women are as ambitious as men
when it comes to their career. Just as men they find a decent salary and reward
opportunities the most important career drivers. Having children does not
influence these priorities. Yet working women too often are overqualified for
the work they do, whereas men are not. This means that there is a lot of
potential on the labor market that remains untapped because women are
frustrated in their career ambitions. The picture becomes worse still, since
working mothers on the whole are paid less than working women without children.
The burden of household and child care in combination with being underpaid for
the work they do, puts working mothers in a dead-end street.
Download in the next link the report Decisions for Work
