Women today are more likely than men to graduate high school, complete college and attend graduate school, and females now comprise nearly half of Chattanooga’s workforce.
But Chattanooga’s top bosses, and the boards that govern most of the region’s biggest businesses and local governments, are still overwhelmingly male. The CEOs of more than 92 percent of the biggest employers in Chattanooga are men; male directors comprise 90 percent of the directors who sit on the boards overseeing the region’s publicly traded companies, and 84 percent of the elected officials in Hamilton County — both at the city and county level — are men. The share of women in leadership roles in Chattanooga is lower than the national average in all such gender measurements.
The gender disparity is hardly new, although more groups are working now to help local women move up in management and narrow the historic gap in pay and positions between men and women.
In the early 1990s, a group of women concerned about the lack of women in top business, government and nonprofit jobs began meeting to talk about their concerns and ways to bring greater gender equity to decision making in Chattanooga. From those meetings, the Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Institute was created 20 years ago this year with a mission to model, teach and inspire women leaders.
“We didn’t see a pipeline of women to become leaders in our community,” recalls Ann Coulter, a former city planner and business consultant who ran for Chattanooga mayor a decade ago. “We wanted to see our daughters and our young friends have opportunities that we didn’t think would be in place if we didn’t try to make those opportunities happen.”
Coulter joined with a half dozen other women to create what became a leadership institute designed to mentor, encourage and train more women to take on leadership roles.
“We decided there was a need for something in Chattanooga to help women who want to learn and take steps to become leaders,” said Marj Fleming, a former manager at General Electric and TVA who serves as CEO of Launchpoint Leadership in Chattanooga. “We simply thought that if we create the right programs and we bring our enthusiasm, our commitment and our passion to all of that, people would want to get on board.”
CGLI has since grown to include more than 400 members from all walks of community life, offering networking and instruction on leadership at monthly luncheon meetings and seminars. Such efforts, combined with the growing share of women earning advanced degrees and moving into higher-paying positions, has positioned more women for community leadership. That has helped narrow the wage gap between men and women over the past four decades, according the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But with fewer women in top jobs compared with their male counterparts, the typical female worker in Tennessee was still paid 10 percent less than her male counterpart in 2014, the most recent year for which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has compiled such data. Women workers in Georgia, on average, were paid 16.3 percent less than male workers in 2014.
Although significant, those gender differences in both states are below the nationwide differences between the sexes. In the U.S. as a whole, the typical woman earned 82.5 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.
Among the 50 states, Tennessee had the least difference in pay between men and women. The typical woman in the Volunteer State was paid 90.2 cents for every dollar paid the typical male worker. Much of the narrower difference, however, simply reflected lower pay for both men and women in Tennessee. Median pay for workers in Tennessee, $696 per week, was 12 percent below the U.S. median pay of $791 per week.
“We’re still making strides in filling many of the top jobs once held by men in a lot of different arenas,” says Patti Frierson, a multimedia account executive at the Chattanooga Times Free Press who is chairman of CWLI this year. “But we still have a long ways to go and we probably have a ways further to go in the South than in some other areas of the country.”
In Chattanooga, Mayor Andy Berke pledged last year to try to narrow the gender gap and appointed a Mayor’s Council for Women co-chaired by City Councilwoman Carol Berz and state Rep. JoAnne Favors. In a report prepared last year, Berz and Favors said they heard repeated instances of discrimination and inequitable treatment of women in the workplace and in the community.
“We have heard numerous stories of women facing challenges,” Berz and Favors said in the council’s first white paper. “There have been stories of women facing discrimination in their place of work, women who have had tremendous struggles during cases of domestic abuse, and many more.”
Census data show female Chattanoogans working in management, business and art occupations earn less than their male counterparts in nine of 11 major job categories. To address such inequities, the mayor’s council recommended that the city enforce equal pay compliance for city government employees and city contractors. The council also wants City Hall to do more to recognize and reward companies who set an example for gender diversity and equal pay.
Some of the pay disparity may be due to the fact women are more apt to work and lead in the nonprofit sector than at major businesses. Among the eight women in Chattanooga who head local employers with more than 100 employees, half of them are the top boss at a local nonprofit or government agency.
“I think nonprofits allow women to lead with their heart and passion and, along with their business skills, to achieve what they regard as success,” says Mical Taynor, a former manager for CWC Office Furniture who serves as executive director for CWLI.
Frierson said men are often more accepting of women leaders at nonprofit agencies than in the often more competitive and better-paying private sector.
“There’s also a lot of tradition of women being more involved in volunteer and nonprofit groups and that tends to also lead to more women leaders of groups like the United Way, the Public Library and First Things First, among others,” Frierson says.
Stephanie Whiting, a graphic designer who started her own consulting and design business, Boho Studio, said she believes sexism is a bigger challenge in the more conservative and tradition-bound South even as more women move into leadership.
“I have yet to go to any business meeting in Chattanooga with another man and him not insist on paying for my lunch, even when I was representing another company and that company was paying for it,” Whiting says. “I was told, “I can’t let a woman pay for my meal.’ The South is noticeably less progressive than the rest of the country and it is especially challenging if you are young and single.”
Some major employers in Chattanooga, including BlueCross BlueShield of Tennesee, Unum, First Tennessee Bank, TVA and EPB, are starting or growing diversity and women’s initiatives to help address such concerns.
“TVA still has some struggles and women are not represented as well as we would like at the top, but I think TVA is working to change the culture and to be more inclusive to better reflect the Valley,” said Domina Alford, a program manager at TVA who served as treasurer of the CWLI last year.
Pam Morris, a CPA and partner with Freight Depot Accounting who chaired CWLI last year, said promoting more women in leadership is important “because women bring a special, unique set of qualities to the table.” Morris recalled when she was studying accounting in the early 1980s, only about 10 to 15 percent of her colleagues were women. Today, more than 60 percent of all accountants and auditors in the United State are women.
“Businesses that work to include and represent the half of the population that are women tend to do better,” she says.