Gender Discrimination Case Study

Across the world, even in the United States, a paragon of progress, women in general are valued less than men because of… something. The origins of this rumor come from a combination of misleading information, the human need for self improvement and a progressive movement based around spreading awareness more than facts. When you grow up in a political bubble like Madison, you tend to hear more echoes than arguments and so when I began to learn about feminism in my middle school history class, the basics that I could gather was that people deserved to be equal and women were paid less than men. For whatever reason I never really questioned it and just believed that “things should change” without really knowing what things would need to change.

More than likely it’s a psychological effect that comes from feeling as though it’s impolite or potentially damaging to one’s reputation to negotiate further. In this case, it’s difficult to determine whether an employer or the employees can be blamed if salaries are unequal and therefore makes it hard to find what exactly could ameliorate the situation. One possible option mentioned in Babcock’s study was to use the phrase “ask for more” as opposed to “negotiate for more” when encouraging employees to seek raises because the latter discouraged women for some reason from trying to find a higher pay grade, possibly because of not wanting to seem argumentative with their

The 23 cent gap has fallen apart in how it was traditionally seen and the 5-7 cent gap is far more likely the cause of women being less likely to negotiate for higher pay. More research is still key to understanding what’s happening, however, and it needs to be explored why women respond to certain incentives, such as job satisfaction, more than men, or why women feel less incentive to negotiate for higher pay, or why each gender seems to choose a certain profession more than the other. It used to be that men and women were segregated into hunters and homesteaders but things have come a long way since the dark ages. Social stigmas and values evolve over time and will eventually become a thing of the past but for now, no physical force is holding someone back from following their dreams and it’s only fair if you want to be a stay at home dad or a petroleum engineer. Equality among genders is something that everybody can agree