Time was the Pink Collar Ghetto was a term to describe traditional women's jobs -- those jobs with low pay and little job advancement opportunities: teachers, nurses and secretaries.

Today, you can have spectacular pay,and an office on the 29th floor, but you will still be in the Pink Ghetto.

The Pink Ghetto, it seems, has expanded its neighborhood. Now the term is being isused to describe any career path that attracts more than a handful of women.

In a recent post, re:invention states the role of CMO(Chief Marketing Officer)is turning into a Pink Ghetto and with that comes gender bias.

Marketing seems to be the way for women to make it to the top. Of the 146 companies listed in the 2005 Brandweek Directory, 37 reported having a woman Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). In recent years, women have headed up marketing units at such firms as General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Staples, Yahoo!, AT&T and Visa.

That's the good news. The bad news is that if you are going to be a CMO, don't bother unpacking.

ODDLY ENOUGH, according to Spencer Stuart's CMO Tenure Report, the tenure numbers for CMOs are in sharp contrast with the numbers for their counterparts in the executive suite. CMOS have nearly half the shelf-life of other C-level executives. CEOs hold out an average of 44.4 months; CFOs last 39.4; and CIOs 36.4.

re:invention's conclusion is:

Women are still being ghetto-ized into marketing -- even being told that the Marketing Department will speed their rise to the executive suite -- only to find themselves scapegoated and pushed out of their leadership roles. Faster than ever before. Faster even than other C-level executives. Guess you could call this a subtle form of "BUSINESS GENDER GENOCIDE." At minimum, it shows that male dominated Fortune 500 boards and C-level executive suites view Fortune 500 corporate marketing much like they view outside retained agency relationships (easy come, easy go).

Several years ago, there was a big stink when the Director of Legal Writing Program was denied tenure. According to the article in the
The American Bar Association, a big factor was that legal writing is perceived as "women's work."

Edwards and some other professors believe that women were steered into legal writing positions. Low-paying, low status legal writing positions came into the fore following the influx of women into law schools, says Levine.

The thinking was that woman would not have to do scholarship or committee service. "You could spend more time doing other things," says Edwards. "It was the mommy track." She and others said that was unrealistic since teaching legal writing requires more time than teaching than other doctrinal classes because of the grading and time required for individual feedback. Women also may have been thought of as second-wage earners, a concept that keeps women's salaries low, says Levine.

This occurred around the time that law schools started admitting more women then men.In writing about this change, the New York Times interviewed a Stanford law school professor, Deborah Rhode who is quoted as saying,'

the greater the number of women in the law the less the prestige for the profession, says Deborah Rhode, who teaches at Stanford Law School. The profession becomes isolated in the "pink collar ghetto,'' as when a prestigious profession formerly dominated by men becomes increasingly female.

Then there's sex blogger Lux
Nightmare's definition of The Pink Ghetto.

Even when it’s not porn, it’s sex: and sex alone is enough to earn the label NSFW. Sex, even academic sex, is something we can’t always discuss in polite company. Trying to build your life, your career, around a discussion of sex means accepting that you will always have a fringe identity. That no matter how academic, how smart, how clean you keep it, you will always be on the edges of polite society. You will always be in the Pink Ghetto, and you will never be able to escape it.

Correction: In the original post I attribute the sexarati's definition of The Pink Ghetto to Melissa Gira. As you can see in the comments, she provided the correction.

Elana writes about busines culture at FunnyBusiness