Pay Gap Myth: Should Women Be Paid?

The average woman in the United States makes approximately $82.90 for every dollar their male counterparts make. (Elsesser). While those 20 cents may seem inconsequential to you, they add up. Losing that much money all year can be the difference between someone living in poverty, and someone living a nice life. The gender pay gap is the cause of this problem. Around the world, women are losing money just because of what gender they are. The gender wage gap is a huge problem, that can only be solved by going to extreme measures, such as requiring people to release their employees wage gap and passing new laws.

The gender pay gap is the difference between male and female earnings averaged in percentages. This difference in pay due to gender seems like it would be an obsolete practice in the twenty-first century, but it is real and is affecting millions of women and households in the country. In 2014, women working full time in the United States were paid 79 percent on average of what men were being paid, which is a gap of approximately 21 percent. This means that in the United States, females earned 94 cents on average to every dollar earned by males. According to one study by the Department of Labor’s Chief Economist, a typical 25-year-old woman working full time would earn $5,000 less over the course of her working career than a typical 25-year old man working in the same career. The reason why this pay gap exists does expand into other factors such as education, experience, the work being performed, qualifications, age, and ethnicity which are taken into account. The studies being conducted on the pay gap has economists verifying that discrimination is the best overall explanation and factor of the difference in pay between males and females.

There is no single agreeable number of how much a woman get paid less than a man. In Flex Work's Potential Role in Gender Pay Gap by Max Mihelich argues “Current numbers show that, on average, a woman earns 77 cents for every dollar a man earns” (Mihelich, 1) 77 cents is generally the number used to argue the wage gap, however there is some concerns of how this number was determine. Christina Hoff Sommers is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, she believes that its just feminist, celebrities, and our politicians spreading this “wage gap myth”. In an interview Sommer stated that the way this number is produce is by “Calculating the median earning of all women working full-time by the median earnings of all men working full-time” (Sommer 4). She believes that this does not show a gender wage

The gender wage gap is the difference in men and women’s annual salaries and can be found in every kind of job at all times. The gap stems from prejudice against women workers, resulting in women receiving less pay than men do for the same work. As of 1999, women make up sixty percent of the workforce and are the main income provider for four of every ten families. Yet, in 2015, the median annual income for women was $40,742 and $51,212 for men. That is eighty percent of what men are earning, or a twenty percent wage gap. In the past half-century there has not been a consistent decrease in the wage gap: in 1960 women were earning sixty-four percent of men’s annual income, in 1978 they were earning fifty-nine percent, and in 2000 they were

Throughout history, even in today's world, women’s achievements are not valued as high as men’s achievements. This has been happening ever since rulers and social classes back in ancient rome. Even in today’s world, women are still discriminated against by females are paid only 84 cents per dollar paid to men on average. Others may say, the statistic that men are paid more per hour account to how females take more time of work, or that women just take jobs that pay less. Anti-wage gap people say that no one is stopping the women of America to go into higher paying jobs, females choose the lower paying jobs to go into by themselves. Nevertheless, the wage gap is not for these reasons, it is purely a statistic

The Gender Wage Gap is defined as the different amounts of money that is paid to women and men, often for doing the same work. Women who work full time, year round earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. Over a year women make $11,500 less than men and throughout their life this wage gap can affect women by making them earn anywhere from $400,000-$2 million less than men do. (Miller 2008, 6) This causes women to have to unfairly face more challenges economically than men do and also makes them have to become more competitive in the workfield. The wage gap varies for women of different races. On average African-American women are paid 60 cents and Latinas are paid 55 cents for every dollar white men make. Over a year this amounts to a

So what is the wage gap? The wage gap is the median earnings of men and the median earnings of women summed up and compared, no other variables were controlled for this study. After all the data was collected, it was found that women make 78 cents to every dollar a man makes. Feminists use this study to prove there is still inequality and that this inequality is due to discrimination, even though it is illegal to discriminate pay based on gender or race. Are feminists correct, are women really being discriminated against in the workplace? The short answer is no, the gap is due to the different choices the average woman makes. Which can be shown if we look at people in their early to late 20s, women in this age range out earn their male

That answer is not an easy one to answer with many people having different solutions to it. Hadas Mandel and Michael Shalev say, in the same article, “ earnings differentials of all kinds narrow when labor enjoys substantial political and institutional power and wage determination is centralized.” (Mandel and Shalev, Jun. 2009, pg. 1874). Analyzing the quote it says that the more power that labor gets both politically and institutional the more the gender based wage gap narrows. With all the many problems the United States have economically it might be easy for this to get overlooked even if it is a hot topic. There needs to be more of a focus on labor. The quote also says that wage determination being centralized has a big impact on if the gender based wage gap narrows or gets larger. Overall more attention given to the topic would narrow the gender wage gap significantly. However Richard A. Epstein has a different approach to the problem. In his article Why Income and Wealth Equality Cannot End Wage Stagnation Epstein says, “ What is needed, therefore, is a complete reversal in direction to undo the current economic swoon. We must concentrate first on growing the pie, not on evening out the size of the slices. No one can predict with confidence how the gain will be distributed… The only confident conclusion is… larger slices for most people.” (Epstein, Dec. 2014, pg. 4). Interesting

Although many people are now bringing up a pay gap between genders, there is something being over looked that proves there isn’t a pay gap, but something else. The Gender Income Gap is a supposed payment gap between men and women, stating that to every man’s dollar a woman only gets payed seventy cents. Statements like theses can grab people’s attention and get them to believe this without much proof of it actually existing. Most people get there information about the gap from surveys over all women and men average pay, this is not a good representation of the topic because it doesn’t go into any detail of actual jobs and difference of pay. There are many other factors that going into the pay gap that would make it into something else not necessarily a pay gap. There are several solutions for this problem most of them aren’t necessarily for equality but for the gain of one sex at the cost of the rights of another. The one I will be talking about later doesn’t need government intervention and doesn’t need for one sex to do more. This solution will come from “changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility.”1

The wage gap has been around for quite some time now. For many years, women working was rare, since they had to stay home to clean the house or take care of the children. But today, you wouldn’t think it was like that, considering that the women’s labor-force participation rate is hovering around 57 percent.but just because they’re participating more, doesn’t mean they’re getting paid fairly. The sad thing is though, is that the pay gap isn’t just based on gender, but age, and ethnicity play a large role too. I get maybe one person having more experience, or education, but gender, age and ethnicity should not have an impact of how much someone gets paid as opposed to one of their coworkers. Many people say there is no wage gap, or that

The first reason why I think the gender wage gap should be closed is because women do equal work to men. China, Russia and India all have more than 48% of their countries believing that women are less capable than men. But is this really true? Women have to work 50 years when a man could work just 40 years to get the same amount of money.

In his article, Truth and Myth on the Gender Pay Gap, Steven Horwitz elaborates on the confusion about what is true regarding the gender pay gap. Stating that, “Whether the gender pay gap is a myth depends upon exactly what claim either side is making.” (1) Making the claim that depending on what one says about the gap determines whether or not it is true or false. He goes on to elaborate on what is a myth. Saying, “Why would people claim this is a myth? Two reasons. First, if the critics are claiming that the 80% number means that when men and women with the exact same skills and experience and preferences do the exact same work that women get paid 80 cents for every dollar men do, they are wrong. That is not what the 80% figure shows.” (1) He says that the difference in pay is not how the media and other makes it seem to be, that for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 80 cents etc, and that the difference is actually explainable by the different and varied life choices that men and women make.

You have probably often heard that for the same work, a woman receives 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. However, this is far from the truth. This 23-cent "gap" is simply the average earnings of men and women employed "full time". This does not account for differences in occupations, positions, educations, job tenure, hours worked per week and much more.

     On average, women earn 74 cents for each dollar earned by the male population. This number is calculated by comparing median annual earnings of men and women. But several other differences between the sexes make up for the variation in pay. Work experience, education, background, skills, and other lifestyle choices account for much of the pay gap.

For every eighty cents a woman earns, a man earns one dollar (Hochschild). That’s a reasonably substantial wage gap. While there are many theories about what causes this wage gap, I think it is quite obvious this gap is caused by an unfortunate combination of insecure masculinity and lack of effort