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...t part, employers do look at the accomplishments of a future employee, regardless of gender. In the past, that might have been different, but today, an employer would hire a more highly skilled women worker, than an average male worker. I think employers have a sort of obligation to hire the women. The companies sometimes feel that if they don’t hire enough women, a discrimination suit could arise and that would hurt not only the company financially, but their reputation as well. In almost every industry, women occupy a very small proportion of the higher-level positions. For example, a 1988 study found that only three CEO’s among the Fortune 1000 were women, and only 1.7% of the COO’s, CFO’s and executive VPs were women. In a 1993 study of Stanford MBA’s, graduates from the class of 1982 were tracked over time. It was found that 71% of the men are currently in the top four rungs of management, whereas only 34% of women had reached those positions. In what I consider a very interesting faction, Business Week did a report in 1987 in which they tracked 100 women executives who were on the fast track from as far back as 1976. They found that none of those 100 women had made it to the top position in a public corporation unless they started the business or inherited the position. Women are not represented at the highest ranks of companies and in the academics because, for some reason, their rate of progression is halted somewhere along the way to the top. The salary picture for women is even more unjust than that for promotion. Women regularly make less money than men do in almost every industry, even when they first start their jobs. An American Demographics study found that women working full time with two or fewer years of experience earn 72% less than men with the same experience. Things haven’t always been like this, though. In 1955, women earned more of a percentage of men's salaries than they did in 1987, 63.9 cents vs. 63.7 cents. Part of the reason for the wage gap is that women don't get promoted as quickly as men. However, a gap still appears between the two. In some cases, it depends on the job. For example, among " programming managers," women made 98% of men's salaries, but among IS directors or managers, women made 82% of men's salaries. Another explanation for the increasing wage gap are that women sometimes choose professions that pay less and professions that you need less experience than men of the same age, because they take time off to raise children. Another researcher analyzed the credentials of 194 corporate managers randomly chosen from 800 people who took a leadership course. He found that "if women were men with the same credentials, they would earn about 18 percent more". These figures can only...