In the “Sexism” article published in April 2008, Conde Nast Portfolio cites that advancement among women to gain parity with men in salaries, promotion to top-level jobs and board room involvement has not just stagnated but it is slipping! Catalyst research tells us that only 2.6% of Fortune 500 companies CEOs are female; only 6.7% of Fortune 500s top-earners are women; and 14.8% of Fortune 500 board seats are occupied by women. Catalyst also calculates that it will take 73 years for women to achieve board room parity alone. Seventy-three years - that brings us to the year 2081. To put it in perspective: current elementary school kids will have retired by that time! And yet, the pipeline is there: 50.6% of management and professional positions are occupied by women and more than 50% of college graduates worldwide are female.

On a similar point, why is it that women are still paid about $.74 to a man’s $1.00 in the USA? Isn’t this subject alone enough to raise your blood pressure? (Add it to the list of stressors for women!) The Wall Street Journal recently cited the following statistics: "Women, overall, are substantially lagging behind men in pay. Full-time female employees earned 77% of all men's median wages. Breaking it down in terms of race - Asian-American women earned 78% of the median annual pay of white men; white women earned 73%; black women, 63%; and Hispanic women, 52%." The difference in pay is still apparent even with 20-somethings earning 20-25% less than men at the same educational level.

A surprising common misperception causing this devolution on the path to parity is that women have, in fact, "arrived" and therefore there are no more barriers to success; we are only limited by our own individual talents and limitations we impose on ourselves, just the same as any man. However, the playing field is not level, for a number of reasons: childcare and family caregiver notwithstanding, bias and discrimination; harmless, but nevertheless influential, informal male social networking; and, of course, inherent biological differences between the sexes.