If you follow my blog, you know how passionate I am about the issue of gender inequality in the workforce. You’ve also seen my commitment to join and support well-known female leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Barri Rafferty by fostering the conversation about women climbing the career ladder. And that is the aim of this post – to speak up yet again and offer you some interesting facts and figures.

My posts on the topic have so far been rather negative – highlighting how much more there is that we need to do in order to ensure real gender equality at the workplace. With this piece, I am going to focus more on the bright side and show you some facts and figures about the progress women have made over the past centuries.

Below you’ll find a very informative infographic that presents a rather optimistic view for the future with millennial women leading the change.

The infographic offers an interesting comparison of how things are now for women and how they used to in terms of titles held, advancement opportunities, aspirations and how having kids factors female careers.

Here are some highlights:

• Only 19% of C-level executives are women.
• Women make 77 cent for every 1 dollar a man makes - in 1980 that number was 55 cent.
• Men's budgets are 2x larger than women's with 3x the staffers.
• 27% of women quit their jobs once they become mothers; only 10% of men do so once becoming fathers.
• Millennial women have more education than their male counterparts.
• 66% of women say being successful in a career is very important, 59% of men say so too.
• In 1980 only 50% of women were in the workforce.

(Click on the infographic for a larger view)

Infographic and image from Human Resources MBA