Five for Friday: Great Blog Posts to End The Week

Not everyone has time to read blog posts. I probably do more than most given that I am a consultant and a blogger myself. It is my research. So to help you along I am posting links to five I think are great to read as a way to end the workweek.

First up is Kris Dunn at The HR Capitalist. His post is Your Company's United Way Campaign = Union Avoidance. It is that time of year for United Way during a time where unions are more active. So this is instructional. It is important to read the comments on this one.

Second post is by Laura Schroeder writing in Compensation Cafe. Her post is entitled What's My Line? She tells a story to show how versitility is an important trait in a new hire and how many companies are missing the boat today because of an abundance of candidates. She has a great line at the end that I thought was as good as the one she remembers from her youth.

The Third post comes from Ben Eubanks at Upstart HR. Ben wrote about a subject that I asked him to write about when he was soliciting ideas. I asked him to write about being a young man in a profession becoming dominated by women. You can read his answer in Men In HR- A National Geographic Exclusive. He has gotten many responses so I suggest you read them. Makes for some interesting conversation with you colleagues. You can also click through and read my original post on the subject Are Men in HR Going the Way of the Dinosaur? There are some people that seem to think that men have never been in HR... well if you have some gray hair you know better.

The fourth post is written by attorney Jon Hyman at the Ohio Employer's Law Blog. He has a great post that points out all the BAD LEGISLATION that is currently pending out there. Actually reading this is a bad way to end the week, but it is better than reading it on Monday and starting out the week in a crappy way. So head on over to WIRTW #145 (the bad legislation edition).

And lastly is a post from Wally Bock. Wally is not an HR guy. He is a leadership guru. In this post he tells a great story about the Wright Brothers to illustrate a point about innovation. So read Learning from the Wright Brothers and make sure you then put the Three Star Leadership blog on your "must read list." After all he is followed and tweeted by Tom Peters. (He follows me too on Twitter, but I don't think he has ever retweeted me like he does Wally.)

How Old Are the Men In HR?

Last week I wrote post entitled Are Men In HR Going the Way of the Dinosaur. I ask the question, based upon some research, whether men are a dying breed in HR. Evidence certainly points to that. Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, depending on what study you read, women hold anywhere from 65% of management jobs to 70%+ of all HR jobs today. The data is not clear on how many of the CHRO jobs are female, but these numbers show that most in the future will be held by women.

A corollary to this is the wages earned by men versus women in the field of HR. Over at Kim's HR Potpourri she lists The 10 Worst Management Jobs for Women, on this list is "Human Resources Manager: Women earn an average annual salary of $57,744, which is 69% of what male peers earn."
One of the interesting things about statistics is you can all kinds of different numbers. This is supposedly a BLS number, yet the studies I looked at show much higher numbers. These figures show women in HR management postions making 79.3% of male counterparts and in specialist postions making 73.4%. Still not on par, but as was shown in 77 Cents and Gender Discrimination: The Wrong Conclusion, written by Stephanie Thomas, there are multiple reasons.

One reason I believe, at least in the field of Human Resources, is age. Given the declining number of men you find it the field, I bet we would also find an increasing average age for men in human resources. And with age generally you see a higher wage. So as the average age of men goes up and the average age of women in the profession goes down statistics will show a wage gap. This may eventually go away as men go away from the field, or at least get reduced in the percent in the field.

I have no numbers to back this up. This is my impression and best guess from what data I have looked at. What do you think? Or better yet what do you know? Anyone have figures on the average age of men in HR versus the average age of women in HR?