The Black Gender Gap

As they graduate and move into the work world, many black women stay just as tough-minded. "I never had this expectation that someone would reach down and pat me on the head," says Laura Murphy, head of the Washington office of the ACLU. "In order to advance, I had to change jobs." For many black women, that professional struggle never ends. "Nobody reaches out to [black women]... And when they reach out, the door gets slammed in their face," says Ella L. J. Bell, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and coauthor of "Our Separate Ways," a study of black and white women in corporations. Indeed, despite all the progress they have made, black women "are the least satisfied [of all groups of women] and overall least likely to stay in their current jobs," says Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst.

Still, for significant numbers the atmosphere in corporate America is changing. In a recently released study of corporate women of color, Catalyst found that 57 percent had been promoted between 1998 and 2001. According to that study, 62 percent of black women reported having mentors, up dramatically from three years earlier, when the number was 35 percent. Although the updated survey drew from a much smaller sample, it indicates something extremely encouraging--that black women may be starting to overcome one of the most significant barriers to career advancement: connecting with influential people in the work hierarchy. Corporate types may still not see black women as members of the club, but they "don't feel threatened by us," notes Gwen DeRu, vice president of a black-owned consulting firm in Birmingham, Ala.

In fact, if watering-hole conversation is any criterion, the most difficult challenge black women face today may lie closer to home. Go any Friday night to Lola's Cajun eatery in Los Angeles and you'll find a weekly gathering of what could easily be dubbed "the black, beautiful, accomplished but can't find a mate club." In bars, colleges and other gathering spots across America, the question is much the same: where are the decent, desirable black men? "When I left high school, I had a boyfriend, but that went down the drain," confides Tametria Brown, 23. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, she found " a lot of people dating the same guy... The dating scene was not good." The marriage scene may be worse. According to the 2000 Census, 47 percent of black women in the 30-to-34 age range have never married, compared with 10 percent of white women. "I figured that as I made more money and got the education that's required to get a good job, that that would automatically make it easier for me to find someone," said Lana Coleman, a Pasadena, Calif., attorney. ''But it's really been the opposite.''

For M. Belinda Tucker, a psychologist at UCLA and co-editor of "The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans," such comments evoke memories of her own experience as a graduate student at the University of Chicago some three decades ago. A fancy education, her black female friends had concluded, came at a significant price. "You were essentially consigning yourself to being unmarried... That's what we said to each other and that's what we were told." Tucker is quick to add that, for many, the prophecy proved false. But the sentiment resonates much more strongly today--if only because the numbers are so much more daunting.

Gwen McKinney considers herself among the blessed in being married to a black man (a systems engineer) who is unthreatened by her success as a Washington public-relations-firm owner. "I just consider myself like the Marines--the few, the proud--in terms of being so fortunate that I have a spouse who is supportive." McKinney believes her husband's comfort level stems from the fact that they got involved before her business took off. "Most of the time it doesn't work unless those relationships are forged before the woman's ascendancy," she says. That many black men seem threatened by successful women is a development that Michael Eric Dyson, author of "Why I Love Black Women," finds ironic. "I call it femphobia--the fear of black women. The same strength that was used to save black men is now being used against them.''

Underappreciated by black men, many black women are looking elsewhere. Connie Rice, a Los Angeles civil-rights attorney and Radcliffe graduate, puts it plainly: "If you have to have the same race, your choices are limited." For years, there has been a general assumption that while black men were comfortable dating white women, black women (for many reasons, some having to do with exploitation dating back to the time of slavery) generally steered clear of white men. Certainly, statistics show that interracial black-white unions, while relatively rare, have been much more common between black men and white women. But the marriage statistics are shifting. And if unpublished research by Tucker and her colleagues is any indication, the dating wall of Jericho is tumbling. In a survey of residents of 21 cities, Tucker & Co. found that 78 percent of black men (average age: 32) had dated interracially at least once, as had 53 percent of black women (average age: 34).