Kristin Klingshirn isn’t shy about earning more money than her boyfriend.
“I always chuckle inside because whenever we go out to dinner, I tend to pick up the check,” the 32-year-old said. “However, the check is never placed in front of me. It is always placed in front of my boyfriend. It depends on how many co*cktails I’ve had — sometimes I’ll be more dramatic about it by reaching across the table to pick it up. It’s comical to me.”
As a cast member on “The Bert Show” on Atlanta’s Q100, Klingshirn’s financial support of her live-in boyfriend has become a running story line on the show, prompting open discussions about income and gender roles.
“It makes [women] more attractive,” Klingshirn said. “By being able to take care of yourself and by being self-sufficient, it shows that you’re a hard worker. Reverse the roles, and that’s the way it’s been for decades. But all of the sudden, I pay the mortgage, and he’s a moocher.”
Despite the surprised looks Klingshirn sometimes receives, she’s actually on the edge of a larger cultural shift, some say.
Single women ages 22-30 with no children out-earn men in 147 out of 150 major U.S. cities — and Atlanta tops the list, according to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau data. In Atlanta, women in this age group earn 21 percent more in median income than men.
Although men still lead women nationally in median income overall, the gap is closing. From 2000 to 2010, Atlanta men experienced a 48 percent jump in median earnings, from $32,654 to $48,256, but women saw a 71 percent increase, from $22,916 to $39,228, according to census data. Liza Mundy, an author and journalist, explores the implications of this trend in “The Richer Sex,” (Simon & Schuster, 2012) which argues that more households will be supported by women than men within a generation, with far-reaching consequences for marriage and family life.
“Women are still getting their minds around their new bread-winning status,” said Mundy. “Women are proud of their earnings ... but they are still struggling to embrace the idea that they are providing not only for themselves but for others.”
An equal share
Roz Alford has seen a lot change in corporate America since 1989, when she founded ASAP Solutions Group, an information technology company in Norcross that specializes in placing computer programmers.
“I come from the ’60s, ’70s era,” Alford said. “We were trying to make sure we were just equal. There weren’t as many [female entrepreneurs] early on.”
Alford’s business was honored in Atlanta this month by the Women President’s Organization as one of the 50 fastest growing woman-owned companies in North America, a distinction it has received before. Ranked No. 25, ASAP employs 840 people who work with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies.
Although Alford says women’s salaries are not, on average, as high as they should be, she thinks the young MBA students she mentors are better positioned for success.
“They are much more confident than, I think, male counterparts,” said Alford, who has been appointed to the National Women’s Business Council, a federal advisory group that reports to the president and to Congress on women’s initiatives. “The women that are coming out of the MBA programs, I see them making more money and getting offers higher than males.”
The trend lines in education are also promising for women’s earning power, she said.
For example, Alford said, the University of Chicago MBA program now graduates classes made up of 45 percent women. “That shows you, as far as higher education, I think women are really going for it.”
Women earned 51 percent of all doctorates in 2009, up from 44 percent in 2000, according to the National Center for Education, which surveyed schools that receive U.S. student aid. Women earned 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and 60 percent of all master’s degrees.
The types of businesses that the United States now excels at are also helping women in the work force.
“If you look at how the economy is changing, we’re moving from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy, which requires skills that women are generally recognized for having great capacity, and that means collaboration, communication and organization,” says Sheryl Connelly, manager of Global Trends and Futuring at Ford Motor Co., which tracks consumer behavior.
Still, the United States lags behind other countries that have already put women in positions of power, prestige or income, Connelly said. Female leaders across the globe include Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil in India, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, all of whom serve as presidents of their respective countries.
“This is not a western or an American phenomenon,” Connelly says. “It’s truly global. Fifty percent of all companies in Europe have women in senior management. ... In China, 31 percent of their top executives are female, and that’s compared to only 20 percent in the U.S.”
Encouragement
Cynthia Good, an advocate for equal women’s pay, feels so strongly about salary inequity in the United States that she started a website, LittlePinkBook.com, to inspire and empower women to be successful.
“The reality is to think that the battle for equality is over is very misguided,” Good said. “Georgia, just like the rest of the country, almost all the board seats of public companies are still held by men. At the managerial level, yes, there are more women. More women are in the work force for the first time ever. It has not yet translated to more wealth or leadership opportunities.”
According to Good, Georgia has more woman-owned companies than any other state, but the impact is lessened by the size of the businesses — 97 percent of them make less than $1 million in annual revenue.
The best thing women can do to close the gap is to be assertive, Good said. When speaking at a recent panel at Georgia Tech, she found the situation paralleled the rest of the country: many women still aren’t pushing for new opportunities.
“Half the women in the room hadn’t even asked for a raise over the last year, “Good said. “Women aren’t doing enough to be their own advocate.”
Alford is a proponent of educating women earlier — as early as grade school — on basics related to engineering and other fields that have traditionally been dominated by men. Enticing them at a developmental age is key, she said. The other component is introducing young girls to successful women, Alford said.
“Males generally have lots of role models, whether it is CEOs, whether it’s sports figures ... and women, we don’t have many female role models,” Alford said. “And until we expose young women to this, they don’t know that they can grow.”
On some level, Klingshirn says she knows she’ll be a good role model for her daughters.
“If I get married, if I have children, if one happens to be a girl, I will encourage her to get a college education, even more so than my mom did,” Klingshirn said. “Thankfully, we are evolving as a society.”
