The Headline Gap

Please please please can we stop with headlines like this that celebrate pathetic progress to what is still extreme gender inequality. We see this kind of Headline Gap all the time. Headlines about record levels of CEOs being women (actually less than 10%). Headlines about women Heads of State (oh, there are also less than 10% of them again). Headlines about women taking all the Board positions (actually around 30% in the more enlightened companies, some have no women at the table at all).

You know when you find yourself in a conversation about the gender equality issue with a man and he says something like ‘That’s not a thing now is it, women are everywhere now, they have a much better chance of getting a job than a man’? Well headlines like these are one of the key reasons that he says and thinks that. Unfortunately in today’s world most people don’t read the small print, they don’t have time to go into depth to really penetrate and understand things. They just read headlines, maybe look at a picture, bank the information in their brains and move on. So when there is a big Headline Gap like this it’s a problem, because it creates incorrect perceptions about progress that we are not making and that we desperately need to make.

Journalists should know better - and do better. The actual headline should be the second line. Women are still being paid 9% less than men. And this isn’t a ‘stubborn’ gap that is resisting big efforts to close it. There is, quite simply, not enough effort put in by most companies & organizations to understand & address the gender pay gap issue by understanding & addressing all of the forces in the workplace that drive gender inequality generally. And feeding them headlines like this isn’t going to motivate them to do something.

Closing the Headline Gap won’t in itself close the Gender Gaps, but it would certainly help.