These skills according to her are more important than her gender. A similar type of a message comes from Susan Arnold, President global personal beauty care at proctor & Gamble. According to her, she has shattered some glass ceilings on the way, but has been treated fairly throughout her career. She was always giving excellent results and this had meant giving the largest profits from any division in North America in ten years, and she was supported by the CEO who was her first boss. She is working in the company for 20 years. (Open to Women? Are we living in a meritocracy or a machotocracy?) Let us now see how the biggest employer, the government views the entire issue. The government has been telling all business organizations to implement policies taking affirmative action and equal employment opportunity in selecting and developing mid level to senior level managers and not place artificial barriers to higher level jobs for minority men and women of all races. That there are such barriers in terms of attitudes and organization itself for preventing or inhibiting equal progress for minority men and women is not doubted. The government is certain that removing such barriers is the correct thing to do. There is a lot of evidence to prove that removal of these barriers will lead to bigger profits for the organizations. Yet the efforts were not being made to hire the widest pool of talent, key employee identification and career development for these groups was not done properly. The result was that the highest paid woman still receives only the 20th highest salary in the organization and the highest paid minority is at the 127th position. It was seen that women were always lagging behind men in salary and minorities were even further behind. There is also "an inverse relationship between affirmative action and discrimination." (Are There Cracks In The Ceiling?)

There have been different studies and one of the suggested reasons is that women have limited opportunities to get broad...

In certain types of industries they are the largest group of employees and there they have a chance of going up faster like business services, telecommunications, insurance, banking and retail. (The Glass Ceiling: How high is it?) The main difficulty for growth beyond a certain point probably comes from the traditional view that men have for women as being emotional, not steady in taking decisions, the possibilities of women leaving jobs to attend their traditional roles as mothers and so on. The other problem is an inherent problem for any man to be promoting a woman - doubts will be cast on the reasons for the promotion. These are not desirable, but that is the way of the world.
Conclusion:

There is no doubt that every person should be getting paid based on the services rendered, but the question also remains as to whether need should have a say in it. Need is what determines the salaries in greater parts of the world still.