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Gender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality

Decent Essays

Throughout history, discrimination has wielded its ugly head in many different forms. Things such as, but not limited to, race, religion, appearance, beliefs and gender have consistently oppressed minorities. A continual discrimination that the women of the world are dealing with takes place in what has been promised to be a fair and unprejudiced environment: the work place. This issue deals with women not being paid the same amount of money as men even though they may be equally, if not more so, trained, educated and qualified for jobs. This historically stems from women being the traditional ‘caregivers’ or ‘homemakers’ while men tended to be the ‘breadwinners’ of the household. This difference in pay based on gender is called the Gender Wage Gap. The Gender Wage Gap is the difference in working pay earned by men and then working pay earned by women. The conventional way to look at the gender wage gap is to compare full-time salaries earned by both of the genders. Up until the 1950’s, it was accepted that men and women were paid different amounts of money. Women were thought not to need to be paid as much as their male counterparts because they were not the “breadwinners” of the family. In the 1960’s, this all changed because people and unions from all across the country fought hard for the Equal Pay legislation. It is now part of the Canadian Human Rights act. Canadian law now requires employers to pay men and women the same pay for the same job and this is called “pay

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