Gender Wage Inequality: A Historical Perspective

Separate but equal was a phrase used often to explain discrepancies in treatment between peoples, even when the reality was nothing so fair. However, this was not always the case in the United States of America. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the wages of women versus men have been steadily converging, with a decrease in the rate of convergence since the 1990s (Blau 2000).

In fact, since wage inequality has been in existence since the creation of the United States, it wasn 't until the early 1900s that gender inequality was even a bad thing (Coontz 2013). During World War 2, women were hired in mass to do jobs traditionally for men, as the men were off fighting the war. It was in 1942 that the National War Labor Board recommended for employers

As late as 1962, a survey done by the University of Michigan found that two-thirds of women believed that decisions that were important to the family should be decided by the man of the house (Coontz 2013). Thus, most Americans didn 't believe that gender equality was necessary or good, and most of the information they learned had stated that women couldn 't pursue careers and be a proper mother. (Coontz 2013). Feminists and women 's right 's activists began the task of challenging women to question the assumption that all women are to be used for is to watch children, maintain the house, and make the food. It was a slow, but steady progress, with two-thirds of Americans believe that it was better for men to be the breadwinners and women to be the bread makers in 1977, but only one-third of Americans believing this was the case in 1994 (Coontz 2013). In the 1970s and onward, there was a shift in American 's beliefs in the qualifications of women in the workforce and in the political atmosphere. For example, Myra Marx Feree found that, in the 1970s, the amount of Americans who would vote for a well-qualified woman for president increased only with the continuation of the women 's movement and protests of the time (Cotter 2011). A trend was noticed, however, that the progress

However, with regard to women and electoral politics, there was not a huge change accomplishments of women until the 1960s and onward (Anderson 1, 1996). Today there is a record number of women in congress, with 20 serving in the Senate and 82 serving in the House of Representatives, which is still below 25% of members of the government (CAWP 2014). Women are underrepresented and less likely to be involved with or run for local or national levels of government. A popular belief, while unproven, is that women are less likely to run because they are concerned about their family responsibility (Fang 2014). Women are less likely to seek government positions because women are less likely to be encouraged to seek government positions, and are therefore less likely to be seen as a candidate for an open government position. Despite this, a Gallup poll in 2014 showed that 63 percent of Americans say that the U.S. would be more well governed if there were more political leaders who are women. So while women need to be more involved in political affairs to reduce the wage gap, the barrier isn 't that women are not wanted in office, nor that they are too focused on their families, but instead that there is very little encouragment for women to enter the political arena at