Unequal Pay Inequality Essay

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,

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.

The gender wage gap has been around since women began having jobs and careers. Though in the beginning the gender wage gap was purely do to discrimination by social stereotypes, now it has become more complicated than that. The issue today has evolved into a complex issue which combines our American culture with business economics. As a result, some are skeptical of the issue and some are very adamant in their beliefs. The issue encompasses not only gender stereo types but also educational, government policies and business’s best practices.

For example, “The mean earnings for male chemists are approximately 30 percent higher than the earning for female chemists, $78,984 and $60,901, respectively” (Broyles). Philip Broyles says that “[e]mployers recognize that generally, women have lower levels of human capital than men and therefore they discriminate against women because they believe they are less productive” (Broyles). Women lose significant amounts of income over their career time because their “salary gains are crimped from the start” (Boushey). Additionally, men receive better dividends just for being men. For instance, Broyles explains that “…while both men and women benefit from more lucrative work specialties, men generally get a higher return on their investments” (Broyles). Moreover, Broyles states, “[m]en with the same level of experience as women earn 6 percent more than women, making experience the greatest discriminatory factor in the earnings gap” (Broyles). To achieve wage inequality in the United States, employers should stop underestimating and discriminating women. Very often, women in the workforce are equally as qualified as their male colleagues, so they should not be penalized for it unilaterally.

The gender pay gap in the United States forms a slightly mixed feeling. On one hand, after years of opposition to the earnings of women compared to men. There has been a large increase in women's earnings since the 1970s. The gender pay gap in the United States is measured through the female to male average yearly earnings for a full-time, year-round worker. Previously, a woman earned 77 cents for every dollar that a male gets. Since 1980, the gap has narrowed by 16.8 cents, improving from 60.2 cents to 77 cents, as stated by the Institute for Women’s Policy. The current pay gap between female and male is 82 cent for every one dollar. This growth is significant because it opposes the relative stability of the earlier incomes of a woman in the

The White House in 2010 created the Equal Pay Task Force to implement the original Equal Pay Act of 1963. This task force has been conducting education efforts, building infrastructure, and enforcing the Equal Pay act in both the private and public sector. In all of its efforts this task force has been very involved and successful in all of its strategies to cease income inequality. However, is it enough? I think based on its results this government task force is doing a proficient job in ending pay discrimination.

Unequal pay is something that has been an issue in America for a very long time. Gender has been one of the main culprits that played a factor in the wage gap between men and women, but race may have a role. The wage gap is expressed as a percentage (e.g., in 2013, women earned 78.3% as much as men aged 16 and over) and is calculated by dividing the median annual earnings for women by the median annual earnings for men. (“The Wage Gap”)

The gender pay gap in the United States has been a tensely debated topic since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Although the Equal Pay Act requires equal pay for men and women, the issue of the gender pay gap has been a heightened issue as time has progressed. Phyllis Schlafly, Mark J. Perry, Anita Little and Sheryl Sandberg each address the gender pay gap in dynamically different ways. Phyllis Schlafly and Mark J. Perry firmly believe that the gender pay gap is entirely created by life choices that women make. While Anita Little and Sheryl Sandberg argue that the pay gap is caused by external forces. Each author addresses: creation of the wage gap, the severity of the wage gap and the viability of a solution.

The most well-known limit placed upon women in a work setting is the wage gap, or the difference between a man’s salary and a woman’s salary. Authors dive into the subject of the current wage gap because of its presence in modern society, and one author who does speak out about the topic is Caroline Fredrickson. Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, writes in her book Under the Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over about how the gap between a man and woman’s salaries does exist in today’s progressive society. To argue her case, Fredrickson reveals, “In the past decade, women have not made any progress at all, with the wage gap overall remaining stubbornly at 77 percent…” (44). This gap of seventy seven percent implies that the majority of women are paid only seventy seven percent of what a man is paid in any given position.

Is America the best country in the world like it claims to be? Numerous controversial issues can keep Americans debating all day long. Bias is one of the main causes of these disputable topics. Discrimination against certain groups of people still exist today in America. Issues regarding gender can lead to big disputes because everybody has a different opinion. Some people believe men are the superior gender, while other people believe the opposite. The controversial issue of wage inequality deserves to be addressed because women are just as equal to men. A step further into equalizing genders would be wage equality. There are economical, social and political reasons why the United States should equalize pay.

Even though men and women who work in the same work place doing the same exact job should be getting the same exact pay, also known as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, this matter is still a constant battle. For example, women earned 79 cents for every dollar that a man earns (whitehouse.gov). This statistic, referred to as the gender gap, has been reoccurring for decades and although the numbers have changed throughout the years, the gap

The gender pay gap is the biggest unspoken problem in America. This issue has been in the world since the dawn of time, but people only started paying attention to it in the last 80 years. In order to close this gap for good, we have to look at where it began. Stereotypes and traditions of stereotypes are the main roots of this problem; before we look at that, we must make sure we stay balanced in our fight against injustice. If we push too far, we will fall into a gender pay gap in favor of women, and I don’t want that I want fair only.

They try to argue that disparity in earnings between the sexes is because of the choices women make such as going into lower paid jobs, taking time off after having kids, and not having the capability to negotiate for a raise hard enough. (Dusenbery 2015, 1) Yet a study conducted by the American Association of University Women in April 2007 showed that men and women’s different choices only explain part of the wage gap. After considering factors like experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, grade point average, institution selectivity, age, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, and children, there continues to be a five percent difference in the earnings of male and female colleagues that is unexplained. They believe that is reasonable to assume that this differences is due to sexual discrimination. In addition their analysis also showed that in almost all the fields women work in ,the women who work full time still earn less than men. (Miller 2008) A different, more recent study that was conducted by the General Accounting Office in 2010 further supported the claim made by the American Association of University Women. It showed that on average women only earn eighty percent of what men do, even after the considered factors that could possibly affect these earnings such as couples marital status, people's race, their children, work patterns like the years of experience and the

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

Despite the fact that the Equal Pay Act has been law since 1963, many problems inevitably arise in the administration of equal pay laws (Fisher). It has been estimated that at this current slow rate of progression in closing the gender pay gap it will be 2068 by the time men and women’s wages are equalized. It is clear that the business case, as well as the legislative case, has a significant role to play (Commission Policy Report).