The Gender Wage Gap and its Repercussions Since forever, there has been this inequality between men and women. This exists in many different ways and is most problematic when it comes to wages. The difference in earnings between men and women is known as the gender wage gap or income gap. Men are considered the superior gender, therefore have better or more privileges than women, and one of them being their income. Half the workforce is composed of mainly women who aren’t being paid enough to support themselves or their households. Women “are the equal, if not main, breadwinner in four out of ten families. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men… the ratio …show more content…
of women’s and men’s median annual earnings was 78.6 percent for full-time/year-round workers in 2014. This means the gender wage gap for full-time/year-round workers is 21.4 percent. Women’s median annual earnings in 2014 were $39,621 compared with $50,383 for men. Neither women’s nor men’s earnings significantly improved compared to 2013. If the pace of change in the annual earnings ratio continues at the same rate as it has since 1960, it will take another 45 years, until 2059, for men and women to reach parity.” (Hegewisch et al, 2015) It is shown that in 1 year, wages for men and women have barely improved and have a long way to go to reach equity. This wage gap is not just about gender, but ethnicity too. It has been proven that when “using white men’s earnings as a baseline, the wage gap is even worse for African-American women, who earn 63 percent of what white men earn. Latinas earn 54 percent of what white men earn. Faring better than other minority women, Asian-American women earn 90 percent of what white men earn.” (Wiltz, 2015). Figure 1. "The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap (Fall 2015)." AAUW: Empowering Women Since 1881. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. Many may agree with the gender wage gap because they believe women aren’t the breadwinners when clearly they are if they’re a single mother. Single mothers have to take care of their entire household without the relief of sharing expenses with a spouse. “Wage inequality isn’t simply a women’s issue, it is a family issue. Recent research has found that 40 percent of households with children include a mother who is either the sole or primary earner for her family. Pay equity is the key to families making ends meet and moving working families into the middle class. Pay discrimination also limits women’s life choices and has real short- and long-term consequences. It impairs the ability of women and families to buy homes and pay for college educations, and it limits their total lifetime earnings, savings, and benefits, which makes women much more vulnerable to poverty in retirement.” (AAUW, 2015). For example, Martha, a mother of a 4 year old and her unborn baby. She is a part time cashier. She works first shift at Kroger and second shift at Walmart. She earns minimum wage and is barely able to sustain her household. Now with the baby on the way she will have to find another job to help pay for the baby expenses to come and pay for rent, electricity, gas and water. After the baby is born, she is thinking of leaving it at daycare because she won’t have time to take care of it and since her mother lives 4 hours away neither can she. She is living on a wage that is not considered a living wage. How can a single mother handle all this by herself? Women face these challenges and pull through somehow. This obviously proves that women can be as responsible with their job as they are with their family. Despite all this, evidence shows that women are more likely to take career interruptions than men and therefore doesn’t make them the ideal worker and thus paying them less than men. Figure 2. "On Equal Pay Day, Key Facts about the Gender Pay Gap." Pew Research Center RSS. N.p., 14 Apr. 2015. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. There are many possible solutions to Martha’s problems.
She could ask her mom to come live with her and pay half the rent, she could move in with her mother and share living expenses with her, she could give the baby for adoption (sadly), she could apply to get help from the government, etc. Because of the gender wage gap, Martha has been having a very hard time living life as a single mother. In order to change this existent inequality between men and women, she could protest about this issue with other fellow single mothers who are for a fact experiencing the same struggles as her. Martha should try and change this now because it won’t get any easier when she retires and doesn’t have a whole lot saved up due to her low paying jobs. It’s proven that “the gap in retirement savings, coupled with women’s longer lifetimes, puts them in a very tough financial situation in their golden years. Women over the age of 65 have a poverty rate of 11.6 percent, compared to men’s rate of 6.8 percent, and they make up more than two-thirds of all the elderly poor. And the number of elderly women living in extreme poverty has been climbing recently. That leaves them exposed to scams, foreclosure, and other serious financial trouble. Beyond potential solutions for closing the gender wage gap over women’s lifetimes, there have also been proposals to expand Social Security so that it offers more of a cushion in old age. And some have discussed including Social Security credits for caregivers …show more content…
who have to take time out of the workforce to care for a family member, such as children or elderly parents, and miss out on payroll contributions. Those who take that kind of time off are overwhelmingly women.” (Covert, 2015). Low paying jobs leads to people not being able to make payments on time and having things like electricity cut off.
Most of the time paying rent is a problem more so if they have a family and occupy a lot of space. Sometimes if rent isn’t payed on time, landlords can tell you to leave and you’ll be homeless in the flash of an eye. “The Global Gender Gap Report 2014 emphasizes persisting gender gap divides across and within regions. Based on the nine years of data available for the 111 countries that have been part of the report since its inception, the world has seen only a small improvement in equality for women in the workplace. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2014, launched today, the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity now stands at 60% worldwide, having closed by 4% from 56% in 2006.” (Bekhouche et al, 2014). The gender wage gap can be avoided or improved by implementing daycares at workplaces so this way the employers don’t have to worry about women, especially single mothers, putting family over work first. The main problem with women is that they have other responsibilities they have to attend to but if work facilitated this then there would be nothing to worry about and women could become the ideal worker thus becoming equal to men and earning the same wages as them and finally eliminating the gender wage
gap.
Though any pay disparity between women and men is a pressing issue, the “wage gap” is much more complicated than people believe because of misleading statistics, unaccounted for variables, and the different social and economic choices of men and women. The common idea that women make 77 cents on every dollar men make in the workplace is very misleading. It is true, however, this statistic ignores any factors that justify different pay. The wage gap is just the difference
For several decades, most American women occupied a supportive, home oriented role within society, outside of the workplace. However, as the mid-twentieth century approached a gender role paradigm occurred. The sequence of the departure of men for war, the need to fill employment for a growing economy, a handful of critical legal cases, the Black Civil Rights movement seen and heard around the nation, all greatly influenced and demanded social change for human and women’s rights. This momentous period began a social movement known as feminism and introduced a coin phrase known in and outside of the workplace as the “wage-gap.”
The wage gap is a major issue that is constantly brought up in the work place. Numerous people use the term “wage gap” to state how gender can affect somebody 's income. There has always been an understanding that men typically made more money than women. For a long time, women were not allowed to work; therefore men were in charge of “bringing home the bacon”. However, times have changed and there are various situations where a household is centered off a women’s’ income. Females can become single mothers who have a responsibility to care for a child(s). Responsibilities can include monthly payments of water and electric bills and even weekly payments towards groceries. Women have to acquire enough money so that they are able
Additionally, we believed men deserved to have higher power by getting more money than women. After some research, we think it’s not fair that women make less than men who have the same education and the same job. In the long run, it can make it hard for women to support their families. We found out that the gender pay gap is a “complex issue with many causes”, which are often inter-related. It seems that the direct cause of this issue is discrimination. We also found out that inequality starts early; just one year out of college, college-educated women working full-time earned $32,000 compared to $42,000 for college-educated men working
When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 into law, he hoped that it would allow working women to finally earn the same amount of money as men; however, more than half a century later, men continue to out earn women in almost every field of work (Lipman para. 4). Male dominated fields tend to pay more than female dominated fields at similar skill levels. In 2012, women earned an average of $691 per week while men earned an average of $854 per week. Furthermore, the majority of women remain unaware that they are earning less than their male colleagues (Hegewisch para. 1). The gender wage gap not only harms a woman’s ability to provide for herself, it also harms many children and families. Women are now the primary caregivers
There are nearly as many women as there are men working, yet, as it was discovered in 2011, on average, a woman will only earn seventy-seven cents for every dollar that a man earns. Women owned businesses make up for over a quarter of all national businesses and earn more than one point two trillion dollars (“Assessing the Past, Taking Stock of the Future” 6). Since many women are now becoming are the primary sources of income in the household, making less that a man does not only negatively affect families, but also the overall economy suffers as well. These women, among many others, are the ones who end up purchasing the supplies that go toward improving communities and stimulating the economy. There is no reason that the general public should stand for this. Women should be treated equally to men in today’s American society based on their biological compositions, psychological profiles and contributions to history.
Women are more than half the work force and are graduating at higher rates then men and continue to earn considerably less then men. There are several contributing factors to the gender wage gap. Women experience gender discrimination in the work force even though it’s been illegal since the Equal Pay Act in 1963. One of the challenges for women is uncovering discrimination. There is a lack of transparency in earnings because employees are either contractually prohibited or it’s strongly discouraged from being discussed. Discrimination also occurs in the restricting of women’s access to jobs with the highest commission payments, or access to lucrative clients.
It is easy to see that we no longer live in the traditional world where mothers stay home with the children while fathers go out and work to provide for the family. When looking at statistics, we can see that the rate of working mothers has actually gone up drastically in the last couple of decades. In 1940, only 8.6% of mothers worked outside the home (Hoffman). However, by 1996, over 70% of mothers worked outside the home (Hoffman). This significant increase in the number of mothers entering the
It is very important to be concerned about the issue because it is constantly increasing throughout the United States. It upsets me that women are paid less than men because women have the same ability and work ethic as men do, but they are looked at differently. According to AAUW, women make 77 percent of what men make. This rate hasn’t changed since 2002 (Hill, 2013). Statistics show that women will never make as much as men due to the thought of never being comparable to men (Williams, 2013).
Overall, women can make at minimum 4,000 dollars less than their male coworkers, who do the same job. (1-4) According to an article found on SIRS, “ lower wages hurt families. Nearly 1.6 million couples rely on only the woman’s pay and 4.2 million married couples rely on the woman’s earnings without a child” (1-2) Women in the work field are often underpaid because of their gender, and women with children are more likely to be paid less than women without; With this, we can visually see single-mother families, struggle to survive because of the underpayment, they receive from having children and from their gender. All of which should not be tolerated.
In today’s society, Women perform similar jobs to men. Whether it’s blue or white collar jobs, women are always present and thriving for success balancing a life of business and family. In the job market, some are graduates of the best schools and have interned at the best firms, but are still not compensated as equally as men. Following the recent comments by the CEO of Microsoft concerning women asking for raises and how they should trust the system to install equality, the issue seems to be still present, and women’s work is not rewarded similarly to men’s.
Historically, males and females normally assume different kinds of jobs with varying wages in the workplace. These apparent disparities are widely recognized and experienced across the globe, and the most general justification for these differences is that they are the direct outcomes of discrimination or traditional gender beliefs—that women are the caregivers and men are the earners. However, at the turn of the new century women have revolutionized their roles in the labor market. Specifically in industrialized societies, the social and economic position of women has shifted. Despite of the improving participation of women in the labor force and their ameliorating proficiency and qualifications, the labor force is still not so favorable to women. The opportunities available for women in the market are not as diverse as those presented to men. Still, the construct of gender ideology influences how employers undertake economic decisions, and that is why companies still have jobs labelled as “men’s work” and occupations categorized as “women’s work.” Indeed, the pervasiveness of gender differences in labor markets is undeniably true, specifically with respect to salary gap between men and women, occupational gender segregation of men and women, and the challenge that women face in terms of juggling their time and attention between their career and family life.
Two-thirds of working women earned less than $30,000 a year. Women were consistently making less than their male counterparts. If a woman employee worked the same number of hours as her male colleague, then she had the right to get paid the equal amount of money as him. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, full-time working women earned 81 percent of what full-time working men earned in 2010, leaving a “gap” of 19 percent between the sexes. If women are paid equally, then it helps the growth of a country’s economy. And, the statistics did improve. Carly Fiorina, Founder of the One Woman Initiative & Global Chairman of Opportunity International, wrote for Forbes Magazine describing that forty years ago, only 1 in 3 American workers were female; today, it’s 1 in 2. There are many advantages of having a working woman in the house too. Having more than one breadwinner in the house helps the family to meet the household
Despite government regulations to promote equality within the workplace, women’s salaries continue to lag behind males in similar career with similar experiences. According to research performed by Blau & Kahn (2007) “women salaries averaged about 60% of men’s until the 1970s and rose to nearly 80% by the 1990s” (as cited in Bendick, Jr. & Nunes, 2012, p.244). Today, women on average earn approximately $.81 for every dollar that men earn in the United States (Guy and Fenley P.41 2014).
Men and women are working harder than ever to survive in today's tough economy. It's a big challenge for low and middle class families to survive. To meet growing demands, it's getting difficult for families to depend on one income. To contribute to family income, mothers are coming forward and joining the workforce. Working mothers are the one who takes care of the family and work outside the home. They may be a single mothers or married mothers. Working mothers usually work to support their family financially. Some of the mothers work, just because they are more career-oriented. Working mothers may work part time or full time. Women are now the primary or only income source for 40% of US households with kids, according to a new Pew survey (Wang, Parker and Taylor, ch. 1). They play a major role in raising their family and doing household chores. There are many reasons that why mothers should work.