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Problem Of Discrimination Gone Away

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Ch. 1 Has the Problem of Discrimination Gone Away? No, the problem of discrimination has not gone away. Discriminations involving race and gender are still happening in the workforce everyday. The employers are given all the power. They determine workers pay, which determines their access to economic resources and power and overall their ability to obtain the good things in life. Much of the race and gender inequality that we see today actually stems from the managerial policies of firms and corporations. Therefore if we want to understand inequality, we must first understand managerial logic. Managerial logic includes things such as the decisions that employers make and why and also involves questions of who they hire and why they did. …show more content…

Firms are much more likely to survive if they put their focus solely on making money and not on solving all the problems that exist in the world. This does not mean that discrimination is a way of making money because its existence does pose problems for economic theory. Gary Becker, who invented The Becker Model, argued that the free market actually has the capacity to completely eliminate racial and gender inequality in employment. The theory is if workers are excluded from their jobs then the wage rate will decrease and the smart employers will hire these new cheaper workers and restore the wage balance. In turn this would equalize the hiring rates for majority and minority workers. This is assuming that the employers are under strict pressure to minimize costs. In opposition buffering from competition is relatively common. Men being generally sexist, often have a preference for hiring men. When firms are not worried about rock bottom costs to survive they often pursue other noneconomic goals. The recent decline of male economic advantages is simply seen as a response to the greater economic competitiveness. Also increased economic competitiveness has affected both women and blacks differently because of the different capacities of each group to serve as cheap …show more content…

The supply side is determined by the relative supply of men and women that actually apply for certain positions. The opposite of this is the demand side, which argues that occupational sex types are determined by the choices of employers themselves. The supply side isn’t very logical since employers have the last word in determining whom they hire. The most common explanation for why some jobs are female and some jobs are male is simply because it is traditional. It has been this way for so long, why change it? A more developed approach is the sex role theory. This explains that companies do not hire women for certain jobs because society agrees that there are appropriate roles for men and appropriate roles for women. An example of this is women being waitresses because they serve food in the home. A third argument is physical strength, which states that women are excluded from certain jobs because of their lack of physical

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