Women Still Feel Like They're Not Treated Fairly At Work

Women are four times more likely than men to say they've been denied a raise because of their gender.

Janie VelenciaAssociate Polling Editor, The Huffington Post

JACOB AMMENTORP LUND VIA GETTY IMAGES

It's 2015, but women are still being held back when it comes to pay and promotions at work because of their gender, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

The survey finds that women are twice as likely as men to say they have been passed over for a promotion because of their gender -- 12 percent versus 5 percent. The gap is even larger when it comes to pay: Four times as many women as men report being denied a pay raise because of their gender -- 17 percent to 4 percent.

While trends on promotions and pay have remained largely unchanged from a 2013 Gallup survey, there has been an increase in the percentage of women who say career advancement is "very important" or "somewhat important" to them, nearly closing the gap between women and men. 

Women also expressed less satisfaction than men did with various aspects of their workplaces, with the most striking disparity in pay satisfaction. Twenty percent of women report being satisfied with their pay, while 44 percent of men say the same.

A report by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, notes that while women have made a great deal of progress in recent years, there is still work to be done. Even though women make up more than 50 percent of the workforce and earn 60 percent of undergraduate and graduate degrees, they still hold a substantially lower number of executive-level positions across job sectors.

Women also continue to make 78 cents to the dollar compared to men, a gap that has remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. The problem is even worse for women of color.

And while the Gallup results reflect a relatively low percentage of women who feel direct gender discrimination in the workplace, studies show that most discrimination occurs implicitly. Several companies have taken steps recently to change their workplace policies to improve gender equity. Facebook has begun to provide implicit bias training to its employees and has changed other policies to be fairer to women, including providing four months of paid maternity and paternity leave. Netflix recently introduced an unlimited parental leave policy for some of its employees. 

Gallup surveyed 1,001 U.S. adults with a subsample that includes 208 employed women and 277 employed men. The interviews were conducted over live telephone calls Aug. 5 through 9.