The Gender Income Gap

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.

In American society today there is an imbalance in the gender income gap between men and women in the work force. Many factors such as discrimination, productivity, educational background and disproportional hours worked contribute to this ongoing challenge. While many are skeptical, others remain to have strong beliefs that women and men are treated equally. In most professions according to Glynn “women only earn seventy seven cents for every dollar earned by men” (2014). Although, the seventy seven cents figure does not accurately reflect gender discrimination, it does capture some discrimination,

Simultaneously, the gender pay gap has financial effects not just on the women, yet their families too. Studies have shown that American families with children count on a women’s earnings as a massive part of their family’s income, and many are the head of the household. Data demonstrates that “seventy percent of mothers with children under 18 participate in the labor force, with over 75 percent employed full-time. Mothers are the primary or sole earners for 40 percent of households with children under 18 today, compared with 11 percent in 1960. Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force has climbed since WWII: from 32.7 percent in 1948 to 56.8 percent in 2016” (Dewolf). Now women make up more than half of the U.S. workforce, the gap in earning deciphers to $7968 per year in median earnings for a high school graduate, $11,616 for a college graduate, and $19,360 for a professional school graduate. By and large, this gap effects hundreds of millions of women and their families, and lag them back hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout their life.

Thesis: The gender pay gap in the United States is an understated misconception to many men and women today. This paper will overview the reality, causes, statistics, and those being affected by gender pay gap, as well as what this issue means for the future of the United States of America.

In the 21st Century the number of women enrolling in higher education institutions is surpassing the numbers of men enrolled. The graduation rates of women from high school and higher education are most often higher than for men. The number of women graduates from most professional occupations, including higher paying medicine, law and business, will exceed the number of men graduates in the near future. In numerous occupational areas with a majority of women graduates, salaries already surpass salaries in occupational areas with a majority of men graduates.

“When women succeed, America succeeds”. “President Obama asked Democratic women to “choose hope” at a speech Friday before the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum” (Seitz-Wald, Alex). The existence of the gender wage gap in the American workplace is highly debated in today’s society. One side views the gender wage gap as a fallacy that has not existed in the economy for generations, these people tend to lean towards the conservative side and believe there are a variety of factors that can explain the evidence many have used to argue the existence of such a gap. The other acknowledging the irrefutable evidence showing the gap in the economy to this day, they believe it is a serious problem that continues to negatively impact

The gender wage gap is not the only problem as also there is another right in which women are arguing for and that is to legally have an abortion. Feminists would argue that they should have the right to choose to whether they want to have an abortion. This reiterates that women still do not have the rights that they feel like they deserve to have and that they should continue to protest and fight until they do. Angela Breslin in her article “A Wall of Legislative Obstacles in the Path of A Woman Exercising Her Right To An Abortion: Planned Parenthood Arizona INC.V. Betlach” argues how Supreme Court Cases on abortion have gone against it therefore violating their rights. She talks about the court cases on how they took away the right to

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

Employers should be required to pay men and women the same salary for the same job for the following reasons. Women can work just as hard as women and don't get paid by the dollar. The gender wage gap is most effective to women in the economy. Would you want to be cheated out of your hard earned money? People need to eliminate the gender wage gap so people can earn what they deserve. There's even a wage gap among men and women are still behind them.

A prevalent social issue in contemporary society is gender inequality in the workplace. The following response will address two key forms of this inequality from two varying theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, I will argue, that job segregation from the structural-functionalist view is simply an organic and natural occurrence, and that under the conflict view gendered wage gap is due to patriarchal society attempting to maintain power at the cost of women. These arguments will be presented by providing context to the issues, empirical evidence suggesting its existence, followed by theoretical analyzation of said issues.

The existing research indicates that this particular subject matter became an area of concern in the year 1970. During this time, women earned approximately 83 percent of what the men could earn (Zheng, Hui, & Linda, 2170). The wage gap has detrimental effects on women of all ages, races, and educational levels. However, the gap has been decreasing since 1980 particularly among the young workers (McCall, 89). Researchers have always found it hard to measure the exact gap between gender imbalances in income due to the diversified nature that both genders choose their careers. In fact, some researchers suggest that women tend to choose careers that are less paying than their male counterparts are. Job segregation has been termed as the main cause of the huge gender income gap (Mandel, 122).

The gender income inequality in Australia does not only place a significant stress upon Australian women and their families but can also damage the economic growth rate of a nation as a whole. Having ethical rights to income, employment and opportunities for women will not just increase personal independence and security but will decrease the dependency on government support including reduction of child poverty rates.

It is important to address the systemic inequalities of the gender pay gap. To do this, this essay will use Bacchi (2006) approach to analyse the text “Speech to HRINZ: The reasons for the Gender Pay Gap” by MP Paula Bennett. This essay will illustrate the theoretical perspective of liberal feminism to show the understanding of the problem, and the solutions of the gender pay gap. This essay will also look at two other theoretical perspectives, social democratic, and anti-racism and discuss their viewpoints and solutions towards the problem.

According to Boris Hirsch and associates, gender wage gaps should vary among densely populated regions and less densely populated regions. Using an estimating Mincerian earnings function that controls for individual characteristics and reflecting the productivity of the worker, we are able to get the ceteris paribus of the gender pay gap that will not be able to be explained by any differences in the productivity of workers. They also used the approach developed by Oaxaca and Blinder which estimated two separate earnings functions- one for men and one for women. They then decompose the gender pay gap into two parts- an explained part due to different endowments in workers characteristics and an unexplained part. This is known as the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (Hirsch et. al., 2009).

This report is going to examine the issue of gender income inequality in terms of age. Gender income inequality can be described as the unequal treatment between men and women in terms of revenue, and has been an issue for women for a long period of time. According to Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the average gender pay gap between full-time men and women increases in accordance to age, when the gap begins to narrow due to reduced income in retirement. This report will explain the main issue of gender income inequality in terms of age, the outcomes, and the solutions for income inequality.