In assessments carried out by the Program for International Student Assessment, 15-year-olds girls performed significantly better than boys on the reading tests in all countries and in all 10 Canadian provinces.
PISA did not restrict the notion of reading skills to prose, but included lists, forms, graphs and diagrams, all of which the girls were able to interpret slightly more successfully than their male counterparts.
Without strong literacy skills, educational and labour-market choices are limited. Persons without university, college or trades training after high school are more likely to experience unemployment or to be in temporary jobs or in jobs that pay poorly and that offer little chance of advancement.
When determining who gets advanced training and the opportunities that training brings, employers tend to choose persons with strong literacy skills, further widening the gap and limiting options for those who have poor literacy skills.
The higher-level literacy skills measured by PISA are exactly the skills employers are looking for in new hires — employees who might eventually add value to the company and provide leadership.
All well and good, but there is a problem. The same young women who at an early age are already outdistancing the boys in skills that define career potential will, in the not-too-distant future, be developing bruises on their foreheads from bumping up against the legendary “glass ceiling.” They will be able to look up and see the executive offices, but it will be the boys who stumble past and occupy those positions.
“Women have made great progress in many areas of society over the past 22 years, but not in the ranks of senior management positions,” Conference Board of Canada Anne Golden said in 2013. “Now that the rousing early days of feminism are behind us, perhaps we have become complacent about the success of women in senior management.”
According to Conference Board data in 2009, women made up almost 48 per cent of the labour force. Yet only 0.32 per cent — 26,000 of more than eight million working women — held senior management positions. That figure had risen from the 15,000 level it was at in 1987, the baseline year for the board’s study.
But the total number of women in the workforce had grown by a similar amount, so the percentage has changed little. By contrast, of the 8.8 million men in Canada’s workforce in 2009, 56,200 or 0.62 per cent were able to rise to the executive ranks. Over the past two decades, men have consistently been two to three times more likely than women to hold senior management positions. The gender gap is somewhat less pronounced among middle management ranks, but it is still significant.
According to the Conference Board, 911,000 men were working in middle management positions in 2009, (more than 10 per cent of all men employed), compared to 543,000 women (seven per cent of all women employed). The situation has not changed dramatically since then.
However, there is good news for those 15-year-old girls who proved their potential on the 2012 international reading tests.
According Statistics Canada, they are part of a trend that continues to see more women than men enrol in college and university programs and then be part of an increasing percentage of women who leave these programs with a diploma or degree.
But, according to Pamela Jefferey, founder of Women’s Executive Network and Canadian Board Diversity Council, the climb up the company career ladder will continue to be impeded by obstacles unrelated to talents or abilities.
“Did I think when we launched Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Awards in 2003, that there would still be a glass ceiling 11 years later? In a word, yes, because I understood and still understand that change, and transformative change in this case, takes time.”
Fortunately for young women looking toward a career in public education, that transformation is already taking place.
The administration of public education is one profession where upward mobility and compensation are not influenced by gender. While women held about 32 per cent of senior positions in 1991, by 2006 that percentage had increased to 56 per cent and continues to climb exponentially in 2014.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
