Women’s Council back to work

Women in the Chattanooga area are more likely than the overall population to have a four-year degree, but they still have fewer representatives in high-skill occupations than men do, a researcher said Thursday during the first reunion of the Women’s Council on Diversity.

Dr. Eileen Rehberg said that 33.4 percent of surgeons but 90.5 percent of registered nurses in the Chattanooga area are women; 15.2 percent of lawyers but 86.3 percent of legal support workers are female, she said.

In 2001, Deborah Levine, editor of the American Diversity Report, started the first Women’s Council on Diversity for area women to meet, network and learn about economic and community development.

It lasted four years and then developed into the Global Leadership class, but “the world has changed enough to revisit the issues,” Levine said.

Women in the Chattanooga Metropolitan Statistical Area – which includes Hamilton, Marion and Sequatchie counties in Tennessee and Catoosa, Dade, and Walker counties in Georgia – still earn 70 cents for every dollar a man earns, Rehberg told the group.

There could be many reasons why, she said.

“But I urge you to draw on your own personal reflection and experience,” she said, instead of focusing solely on statistics. And she emphasized that every occupation is needed and valued.

Gail Dawson, associate professor of management at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and participant in the first Women’s Council on Diversity, said the meetings are an opportunity to build awareness.

“I would like to see more women graduate from high school and get into jobs outside the traditional gender fields,” she said. “That’s the only way we can really close some of those gender gaps and put women on par as far as financially and power.”

The first issue the group will focus on is the high failure rate of women-owned businesses, Levine said.