• Home
  • Latest
  • Fortune 500
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • Leadership
  • Lifestyle
  • Rankings
  • Multimedia

Trendingnow

1

Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion for climate change. With the 2030 clock ticking, his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, is leading the charge to spend it

2

Anne Hathaway says she was spammed with ChatGPT-written thank you notes after hiring for a recent role: ‘Nobody on that list gets that job’

3

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed Chrome as a 'rounding error'—but Google’s CEO says he used the jab as fuel to win the browser-wars

1

Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion for climate change. With the 2030 clock ticking, his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, is leading the charge to spend it

2

Anne Hathaway says she was spammed with ChatGPT-written thank you notes after hiring for a recent role: ‘Nobody on that list gets that job’

3

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed Chrome as a 'rounding error'—but Google’s CEO says he used the jab as fuel to win the browser-wars
MPWMost Powerful Women

Men Really Are Clueless About Their Female Coworkers

By
Rick Wartzman
Rick Wartzman
and
Aaron Task
Aaron Task
Down Arrow Button Icon
By
Rick Wartzman
Rick Wartzman
and
Aaron Task
Aaron Task
Down Arrow Button Icon
March 10, 2016, 9:00 AM ET
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Glass ceiling? What glass ceiling?

That’s the view of the vast majority of male employees when it comes to workplace discrimination faced by women, according to a new PayScale survey—and it points up a huge challenge to overcoming the problem: You can’t fix something that you don’t see.

The PayScale survey, conducted online over the past couple of months with about 140,000 people from a broad range of industries, found that 67% of men believe that in most workplaces “men and women have equal opportunities.” Yet only 38% of women say that’s the case.

For those in jobs related to technology—a field that has found itself under heavy scrutiny for the way women are treated—the gap is even larger: 66% of men in tech positions say there is equal opportunity for all in most workplaces, while just 30% of women in tech do.

The findings jibe with studies done by others, including this 2015 study by the Pew Research Center.

“There’s clearly a difference in perception,” says Aubrey Bach, a senior manager at PayScale, a Seattle-based provider of compensation data, who will present the survey results during a panel on Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. “Men don’t think inequity is an issue.”

The reality, however, is that it is.

Overall, women continue to earn 15% to 20% less than men—a disparity that grows the longer that women remain working outside the home. In the U.S. and Canada, Mercer has found, women account for a mere 22% of corporate executives, 30% of senior managers, and 38% of managers (even though they make up nearly half the American labor force). And research by Michelle Budig, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, shows that when families have children, fathers get a wage bonus; mothers suffer a wage penalty.

Interestingly, the PayScale survey found that both men and women have relatively favorable impressions of how women are treated inside their own companies. Seventy-five percent of male employees in general and 80% of men in tech jobs say there is equal opportunity for all at their workplace. By comparison, 51% of women and 44% of women in tech positions say that’s so.

Matt Wallaert, a behavioral scientist who will take part in the SxSW panel, suggests that people often have a hard time admitting that their own employers aren’t fair to everyone because it can make them uncomfortable. “It’s psychological protection,” he says. In any event, the gulf between what men and women feel is happening where they themselves work is every bit as enormous as what they think is true of the wider world.

That so much empirical information is out there—and yet so many men fail to recognize what their female colleagues are up against, especially in tech—frustrates Wallaert, who is the co-founder of GetRaised.com, a free service that helps women obtain higher pay.

“It’s those in the tech industry, which thinks of itself as full of logical and data-driven engineers, who are most likely to say sexism isn’t a problem in their workplace,” he says. “That’s just amazing. There is a real need for men to step up to the plate.”

Perhaps part of the reason that men are largely blind to gender bias in the workplace is that, all in all, it’s not nearly as blatant as it was in the 1950s and ’60s, when the ranks of women entering the labor force began to swell. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for major employers to focus on a woman’s appearance, not her aptitude.

“This winsome lass is Carol Goff, a clerk-typist in shipping,” General Electric’s distribution transformer department in Oakland, Calif., announced in the “Who’s New” section of its internal newsletter in late 1961. “Another pretty lil’ gal, Joyce A. Tate, is our new mail girl.” When one of GE’s few female engineers had visited a company factory in Massachusetts in the mid-1950s to check on some production parts, she’d gotten the same treatment. “Not even a visitor from Mars could have attracted more attention than Betty Lou Bailey,” a GE publication reported. “Not that the visitor had any of the characteristics of a Martian—in fact, with her blue-eyed, blonde-haired attractiveness she would have been an eye-catcher anywhere.”

But just because sexism is now simmering more beneath the surface doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

“Companies play hot potato with the issue,” says Liz Morgan, who is in charge of recruiting Bay Area engineering leaders at LinkedIn (LNKD). “They usually look to HR and recruiting to fix the problem by increasing the talent pipeline with more female candidates and conducting unconscious-bias training. It’s a good start, but more needs to be done.”

Morgan, who will join Sunday’s panel, recommends that companies take a number of specific steps, including more rigorously evaluating and making transparent hiring, compensation, turnover, and retention data—“and holding management accountable” when there are inconsistencies between men and women. At least a few companies, such as Salesforce (CRM) and Pinterest, are moving in this direction.

Morgan also calls on companies to do what the NFL — not normally regarded as a paragon of progressive attitudes toward women — is doing: instituting “the Rooney Rule,” which would require that they interview women (and others who would bring more diversity to the organization) for executive positions. In addition, she says, they must build a deeper internal bench of potential women leaders and that it’s important for companies to establish equal standards and expectations for men and women on policies such as flex time, and paternity and maternity leave.

Finally, says Morgan, corporate leaders need to work harder to foster a truly “collaborative culture.” One key to this, she says, is that companies should make sure that formal support networks designed to help women include men.

“Right now, they’re not consistently part of those conversations,” Morgan says.

Evidently, that’s helped them reach a faulty conclusion: that gender discrimination is a thing of the past when, the truth is, there’s a long, long way to go.

Rick Wartzman is senior advisor to the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. The author or editor of five books, he is currently writing a narrative history of how the social contract between employer and employee in America has changed since the end of World War II.

About the Authors
By Rick Wartzman
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
By Aaron Task
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Latest in MPW

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025

Most Popular

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Fortune Secondary Logo
Rankings
  • 100 Best Companies
  • Fortune 500
  • Global 500
  • Fortune 500 Europe
  • Most Powerful Women
  • World's Most Admired Companies
  • See All Rankings
  • Lists Calendar
Sections
  • Finance
  • Fortune Crypto
  • Features
  • Leadership
  • Health
  • Commentary
  • Success
  • Retail
  • Mpw
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • CEO Initiative
  • Asia
  • Politics
  • Conferences
  • Europe
  • Newsletters
  • Personal Finance
  • Environment
  • Magazine
  • Education
Customer Support
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Customer Service Portal
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Single Issues For Purchase
  • International Print
Commercial Services
  • Advertising
  • Fortune Brand Studio
  • Fortune Analytics
  • Fortune Conferences
  • Business Development
  • Group Subscriptions
About Us
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • LinkedIn icon
  • Instagram icon
  • Pinterest icon

Latest in MPW

With the exits of Apple’s Tim Cook and Dow’s Jim Fitterling, the Fortune 500 is losing two groundbreaking gay CEOs—leaving just one 
C-SuiteLeadership
With the exits of Apple’s Tim Cook and Dow’s Jim Fitterling, the Fortune 500 is losing two groundbreaking gay CEOs—leaving just one 
By Phil WahbaJune 20, 2026
10 hours ago
Exclusive: Azzi Fudd joins Project B, the international league chasing a billion-dollar opportunity in global basketball
MPWSports
Exclusive: Azzi Fudd joins Project B, the international league chasing a billion-dollar opportunity in global basketball
By Emma HinchliffeJune 19, 2026
1 day ago
Arianna Huffington swears by one boundary to switch off from work every night—and Ralph Lauren’s CHRO says it’s the best thing she’s ever done too
SuccessDay in the Life of a CEO
Arianna Huffington swears by one boundary to switch off from work every night—and Ralph Lauren’s CHRO says it’s the best thing she’s ever done too
By Orianna Rosa RoyleJune 19, 2026
1 day ago
z
PoliticsElections
Zohran’s primary of power: the Democrat that Republicans fear most runs New York City
By Steve Peoples, Anthony Izaguirre, Matt Brown and The Associated PressJune 18, 2026
2 days ago
Trump caught on hot mic saying one word to EU’s top official at the G7: ‘Greenland’
EuropeDonald Trump
Trump caught on hot mic saying one word to EU’s top official at the G7: ‘Greenland’
By The Associated Press, Rob Gillies, Sylvie Corbet, Darlene Superville and Collin BinkleyJune 16, 2026
4 days ago
REE Corp. chair Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh spent 40 years navigating Vietnam’s economy. Here’s what she thinks comes next
MagazineVietnam
REE Corp. chair Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh spent 40 years navigating Vietnam’s economy. Here’s what she thinks comes next
By Nicholas GordonJune 16, 2026
4 days ago

Most Popular

Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion for climate change. With the 2030 clock ticking, his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, is leading the charge to spend it
Environment
Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion for climate change. With the 2030 clock ticking, his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, is leading the charge to spend it
By Sydney LakeJune 19, 2026
1 day ago
Anne Hathaway says she was spammed with ChatGPT-written thank you notes after hiring for a recent role: ‘Nobody on that list gets that job’
Success
Anne Hathaway says she was spammed with ChatGPT-written thank you notes after hiring for a recent role: ‘Nobody on that list gets that job’
By Orianna Rosa RoyleJune 18, 2026
2 days ago
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed Chrome as a 'rounding error'—but Google’s CEO says he used the jab as fuel to win the browser-wars
Success
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed Chrome as a 'rounding error'—but Google’s CEO says he used the jab as fuel to win the browser-wars
By Preston ForeJune 17, 2026
3 days ago
The affordability crisis is so bad that, for the first time ever, both mom and dad are working full-time in most American families
Economy
The affordability crisis is so bad that, for the first time ever, both mom and dad are working full-time in most American families
By Jacqueline MunisJune 17, 2026
3 days ago
Exclusive: Azzi Fudd joins Project B, the international league chasing a billion-dollar opportunity in global basketball
MPW
Exclusive: Azzi Fudd joins Project B, the international league chasing a billion-dollar opportunity in global basketball
By Emma HinchliffeJune 19, 2026
1 day ago
The man who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and helped wealthy Chinese move to Canada sees a familiar picture in America
Success
The man who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and helped wealthy Chinese move to Canada sees a familiar picture in America
By Nick LichtenbergJune 17, 2026
3 days ago

© 2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.