Breaking Through The Glass Ceiling

Eileen Burza, chief financial officer and senior vice president of Perdue Farms, recently spoke at Salisbury University about the progress that women are making and how much farther they have yet to come reports DelmarvaNow.com

“I guess I’m a woman in business, but I’ve never really thought about being a woman, any more than being 5 feet tall — it’s just one of my attributes,” Burza said.

But other people took Burza’s gender into consideration throughout her career, she said — and not always in a positive way. She told the story of how when she attended an international meeting of top executives for a company she worked for in the past, she was mistaken for “the coffee lady.”

“But believe me, after that mistake, everyone knew who I was in that company,” Burza said.

Women comprised 46.8 percent of the total U.S. labor force in 2009, the U.S. Department of Labor says, and are projected to account for 46.9 percent of the labor force in 2018. And yet, according to 2008 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, women who were full-time wage and salary workers earned only 80 percent of the median wage for their male counterparts.

But things are improving, Burza noted.

In 1979, women earned about 62 percent as much as men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Photo by Nesster

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