American women may be better off than their ilk in most countries when it comes to equality with men, but over a third of female workers in the US believe they are paid less than their male colleagues, says a survey.Also, working women in the US feel they get a raw deal compared to men in career advancement, training and workplace flexibility, according to the survey by the country’s top job website CareerBuilder.com.“Employers are increasingly introducing programmes to promote equality, yet more than one-third (34 per cent) of female workers say they feel they are paid less than their counterparts of the opposite sex with the same skills and qualifications,” it said.On their part, 11 per cent of men also said they feel being paid less than their female counterparts.The survey comes on the back of a recent media report, by Cybercast News Service (CNS News), saying that women are outnumbered and under-paid than men in the Senate staff of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.That is in contrast to Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s Senate office, where women mostly out-rank and are paid more than men, the report had said.In a separate report on wage trends in India, International Labour Organisation (ILO) said that the trend of women employees being paid less than men has increased up among regular workers in the country.The ILO study found that wage disparities between men and women is not only among the shopfloor workers, but also in white-collar jobs across industries.It said that women employees in financial services, hotels and restaurants and even manufacturing sectors earn much less than their male counterparts.Commenting on the CareerBuilder.com survey, the company’s Human Resources Vice President Rosemary Haefner said that the number of women feeling paid less than men has changed little over the last two years from 35 per cent in 2006.“While companies have taken great strides to address equality in the workplace, there is still a lot of work ahead,” she added. However, it is not only salary where women feel that they are discriminated.Over a quarter (26 per cent) of female workers said they have fewer career advancement opportunities than their counterparts of the opposite sex with the same skills and qualifications, 18 per cent said they do not get the same amount of training and learning opportunities and 17 per cent say they do not have the same amount of workplace flexibility.When it comes to specific industries, women who work in healthcare, hospitality, and education are less likely to feel being paid less than their male counterparts.While women working in IT, and banking and financial services are near national average, those in manufacturing, retail and professional and business services are more likely to report pay discrimination.On the flip side, 21 per cent of men in hospitality and 16 per cent of men in banking and financial services said they are paid less than women workers with similar credentials.When asked to what they attribute the discrimination, nearly half (48 per cent) of women said management tends to show favoritism to members of the opposite sex.Besides, 32 per cent of women said men are perceived as needing to have more money to support their families; 30 per cent said men tend to get better or more high profile projects and 23 per cent said men tend to be more aggressive in pay compensation negotiations.The survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder.com among 7,960 US employees.
