Inequality among women explored

All women are not equal in the workplace.

That was the focus of a ''town hall" meeting yesterday at Simmons College, where a diverse crowd of nearly 200 businesswomen and academics discussed the unspoken differences between white and minority women in the workplace.

Research shows that African-American, Asian, and Latina women professionals and managers continue to trail white men and women in compensation and promotions, said Carol J. Evans, chief executive and president of New York-based Working Mother Media, which convened the meeting.

One measure of the difference between white and minority women is pay. White females earn 73 cents for every dollar earned by a white male, according to a study released last month by the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C. By contrast, Asian women earn 68 cents, African-American women, 64 cents, Native American women, 58 cents, and Latina women earn 51 cents per dollar. The study included executives and frontline workers.

Part of the pay gap owes to educational differences between white and minority women, but in candid discussions participants also said minority women continue to battle stereotypes and discrimination that can impede their career progress.

Latina women professionals often feel invisible at work because they are not part of the informal networks that could advance careers, said Evangelina Holvino, the director of the Simmons Center for Gender in Organizations and a conference speaker.

''One woman told me recently that she did not receive any e-mails about meetings at work," said Holvino in an interview. ''Nor was this woman invited to meet the director. This is a dilemma that women of color face: They are not part of the networks."

Participants also said minority women are sometimes constrained by race and gender as they compete against white and minority males and against white females for recognition and promotions.

Women overall made significant progress in terms of promotions in 2002 but minority women saw few gains, according to Catalyst, the New York women's research group. It reported that nearly 16 percent of officers at Fortune 500 firms were women, up from 12.5 percent in 2000. When the group looked at minority women, however, it found only 1.5 percent were corporate officers in 2002, up from 1.3 percent in 2000.

Although women still face gender bias at work, some minority professionals said yesterday their white female peers sometimes made it difficult for them to succeed by not mentoring them or inviting them to join their networks. For example, when a Latina bank manager said her white female supervisor had mentored her at a time when there were only a handful of women at the financial institution, an African-American manager wondered whether that supervisor would have been as eager to mentor a black subordinate.

Yesterday's conference was spurred, in part, by three studies about the progress of minority women released in 2002 by Catalyst. One found female African-American managers felt their authority was unnecessarily challenged by subordinates and colleagues. Latina women said in a separate study they were often seen by higher-ups as lacking commitment because of their involvement with family. A third report also revealed that 51 percent of Asian women do not have mentors. The reports were gleaned from interviews with more than 1,200 minority women professionals and managers.

Specialists said many minority women face roadblocks because the white male and female executives they work for have had few relationships or interactions with women of color. White women are more likely to be promoted and mentored by the powerful white males who employ them because they share the same race, according to David A. Thomas, a Harvard Business School professor who spent several years tracking the progress of minority managers at several Fortune 500 firms.

''White men benefit most in the system because they are the dominant group in power positions," said Thomas, author of ''Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America." ''But who are white men most familiar with? They are most familiar with white females, and they are more likely to feel more empathy for white women when it comes to disadvantages in the system." Thomas said that although white women have benefitted more from affirmative action than any other group, most no longer see themselves as beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. For that reason, he said, ''There is tension between white women and women of color."

In discussions yesterday, several participants agreed. ''White women don't think about affirmative action," said Evans. ''We feel we have persevered individually through incredible effort . . . and that is how we've gotten ahead."

Participants said the only way to break down barriers to communication between white and minority women is to continue to encourage firms to allow them to form discussion groups and mentoring programs that would prompt them to work more closely together.

Diane E. Lewis can be reached at dlewis@globe.com.