Essay On Unequal Pay

Unequal pay, or the gender pay gap, is an issue that every type of woman in the United States is affected by. This gender pay gap has continued to exist, yet has gotten smaller over the years. Regardless of the size of the pay gap, it is a situation that a large amount of people, both men and women, find to be unjustifiable.
The unequal pay that exists today dates back to early on in our society. During World War I, the American labor force had both separate work and wage tracks, one for men, and another for women. This job segregation was based mostly on stereotypes of female and male roles in the U.S. economy and society. It was assumed that women were less productive than men for many jobs. Also, they were viewed as short-term workers who would marry and leave the labor force for household obligations. Therefore, they were thought to need less income than men, who were considered the main source of income in families. Because of these views, most women were confined to jobs that involved low pay, and little training.
The segregated employment pattern was quickly broken in the war industries once World II began. It began to change earlier during the Great Depression, when women began to attempt to replace the earnings of their unemployed husbands. They were hired for factory work by employers seeking

to reduce labor costs. Unfortunately, unequal equal pay was usually the major incentive for hiring these women. For example, men that earned 45-50 cents an hour were replaced by women earning 25-30 cents in parts of the Michigan automobile industry during the 1930s.
Labor shortages developed at the outbreak of World War II, due to expanded war production and loss of workers to the military. It quickly became necessary to employ women in occupations they had not held previously. In some situations, women completely took over a job class that was all male, and in others they worked along with men at jobs from which they had previously been excluded. Many of the firms that increased their employment of women at this time had separate wage scales that provided lower wage rates for “female” jobs. Pay inequities were created when the women that were assigned formerly male jobs, were continued to be payed at lower rates.
Due to the National War Labor Board policy, there was a major movement toward abolishing wage differentials based on sex during World War II. In November 1942, The Board’s General Order No.16 authorized employers to raise wage rates for females who were being paid less than males “for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations.” These wage adjustments could be made without Board approval. Over two thousand employers reported these voluntary wage increases between November 1942 and January 1944, showing both the existence of unequal pay at the beginning of the war and the elimination of many of these practices during the war. In fact, many employers urged the War Labor Board to adopt an equal pay policy so that they could raise female wage rates and attract the desperately needed female workers.
Encouraged by the Work Labor Board, the practice of job evaluation increased greatly during and after World War II. The National Industrial Conference Board reported that 13 percent of firms surveyed in 1939, used this technique, compared to 57 percent in 1947. Although some employers set lower wage rates for female dominated jobs that were evaluated as equal to those of males, it appeared not to have occurred when men and women were performing work of the same rigor.
Despite the success of a federal equal pay policy during World War II, it could not be enacted in the postwar years. The legislation was not again seriously considered until it was supported by the Kennedy administration in in 1962, which was seventeen years after the war ended. At that point, women were one-third of the total labor force, compared to one-fourth in 1945, and were an increasingly necessary aspect of the United States’ work force. Due to continued growth of sophisticated personnel practices, the need for an equal pay statue appeared to have declined over that period of time. This meant a continuation in the segregation of men and women into different jobs, and the pursuit of equal pay policies by trade unions.
By 1963, the average earnings of women workers in the United States were about 60 percent of those of men’s earnings . Only a small percentage of women gained access to upper-level occupations in business, professions, or government. At this time, many people believed a large amount of women were doing the same work as men, yet were still being paid less for it. Women needed better wages for the equal work they were doing, as well as equal pay. It was these setbacks that triggered President Kennedy to establish the national Commission on the Status of Women under a mandate to recommend ways to end any barriers to the full realization of women’s basic rights. Eventually, this Commission recommended the Equal Pay Act.
The Equal Pay Act was passed through legislation in 1963, and meant that employers cannot pay women less than they pay men when both are performing equal work on the employer’s premises, except when the larger pay to men (or women) is justified by a widely accepted standard like seniority, merit, or output.

Although the Equal Pay Act was used to solve the inequality in the work force, it was an extremely limited approach to the problem, directed only to unequal pay for the same work when performed by men and women within individual establishments. Also, it did not fix the problems of a women’s limited access to jobs or the low pay for occupations they could

enter.