Gender Wage Gap America, home of the brave and land of equality. At least that’s what most Americans and immigrants believe. What most citizens don’t have knowledge of is the gender pay gap that exists against women in occupations. Women make 78 percent of what the median of men make working year round in the same occupation (Stevensen 2015). This gap dates back all the way to the 1900s. There are many factors that play into it including motherhood, interest differences, and companies’ freedom of choosing salaries. The government has tried to address this issue in the past by passing the Equal Pay Act, the Fair Labor Standards, and the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Businesses and corporations have found loopholes and ways around these acts to pay workers …show more content…
The Paycheck Fairness Act is designed to help workers who believe they have been discriminated against based on their wage and gender. This act will make wages more transparent for the public, and will protect employees from retaliation from their companies when they raise question about wage discrimination. Businesses will also have to have proof that wage differences are connected to legit business qualifications and not gender (“S.84-Paycheck Fairness Act,” 2014). The wage gap is influenced by motherhood, occupational differences, and supply and demand factors. The Paycheck Fairness Act will accelerate the closing of the wage gap along with societal and policy changes. Occupational differences have been around since the eighteen and nineteen hundreds. Naturally men and women tend to go in different directions when it comes to careers. It has been concluded through data …show more content…
It is shown that women are less likely to receive an offer for health insurance, retirement savings, or paid leave (Stevenson, 2015). Companies are also weary to give women compensation packages because of the responsibility of children that come along with being a mother. For maternity leave women need a couple months to recuperate and nurse the baby. Companies don’t like to give maternity leave because they believe it hurts their capital and efficiency. When a child is sick or needs a parent the mother is usually the one that stays home with her child or goes to help. Mothers need to have paid sick days for her and her children which doesn’t make the company happy because it screams money loss. These situations and factors influence the employer’s decision on whether to hire women, and how much pay they will get. An experiment was conducted and analyzed in 2009 by two men, Gangle and Ziefle. They looked at motherhood and the wages associated with it. The results ended in a penalty for mothers’ careers between 9% and 18% per child with Germany at the higher end of the range and Britain at the low end. The United States placed approximately in the middle of that range. It was determined that for British and American mothers work interruptions and mobility into mother-friendly jobs account for the mothers’ wage losses (Gangle & Ziefle, 2009). The median wage penalty for American mothers comes out to be around $11,000 (Pew, 2012).
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
Policy statement: Women should receive equal pay for work of equal value. It is recommended that the Canadian government should design and pass a compulsory and proactive pay equity law, which would ensure that all Canadians receive equal pay for equal work.
Another reason for the pay discrepancy is that women are usually employed in low-wage occupations and industries, such as teaching. Even women working in the same industry, and having equal qualifications, earn less than their male counterparts — in fact, even top women executives earn considerably less, on average, compared to their male peers (Patel, 2016). The other reason for the gender pay gap is that more women than men work part-time jobs. According to the Canadian Women's Foundation (n. d), for the last 30 years until 2013, about 70% of part-time/temporary workers were women, which translated to 60% of minimum wage earners being women. Finally, the Canadian Women's Foundation (n. d) claims that approximately 10-15% of the wage gap is
The reality of wage differences between men and women is that above all changes women continue to earn less than men. Countless arguments have promoted that wage inequality has changed and that everyone finally receives an equal amount of pay. “For women of color, the gap is largest of all: In 2006, black and Hispanic women earned 86 and 87 cents on the white man’s dollar, respectively,” (Mcswane 2). If a woman is lucky enough she will get an equal pay compared to a man doing the same job. But it is challenging for a woman of a minority background to achieve this. Not only are women paid less because of their sex, but also because of their race. There seems to be a mentality that because someone is a woman and a minority that they cannot do the same job as men or that women do not have the same education as the men, so employers do not have to pay them the same. “When the numbers are broken down by district, they 're pretty hard to ignore. Women in Texas are being utterly screwed financially, according to the data compiled by AAWU, with women earning anywhere from 66 percent of what men do in some districts, to the top end of things, which is about 89 percent,” (Leicht 4). The proof cannot be ignored. It i...
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
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 United States has one of the highest gender pay gaps among the developed countries. In the country, the gender pay gap is measured as the ratio of female to males yearly earning among workers in full-time, year round (FTYR) earnings. In 2009, female FTYR earned 77% (0.77) as much as the FTYR male workers (US Census Bureau, 2013). The history of Gender Gap earning reveals USA has made big strides towards reducing the gender pay gap from 1980. For instance, in 1980 the gender pay gap ratio was 0.62 while in 1990, the gap stood at 0.72. Further from 1990 to 2000, the gap reduced to 0.73 and then to 0.77 in 2009. Currently, the gender pay gap stands at 0.76 and continues to persist (US Census Bureau, 2013).
With a record 64 million women in the workforce, pay discrimination hurts the majority of American families. Families lose $200 billion in income annually to the wage gap—an average loss of more than $4,000 for each working family. In addition, wage discrimination lowers total lifetime earnings, thereby reducing women’s benefits from Social Security and pension plans.
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.
For many years in United States, equal salary pay for women has been a major issue that women have been fighting for decades. This began back in World War II, when the National Labor Board urged equalize the salary rates for women with the same rates that males were getting of the same professions. (Rowen) Although, traditionally most women do not work to provide for there family and there are not so many independent women during World War II. After World War II more women lost their jobs to veterans returning to the workforce. Women in the workforce after the war have been discriminated ever since. The idea of women as weak and cannot perform there jobs
One cannot begin the discussion of gender pay gap without defining it. Simply put, gender pay gap is the inequality between men and women wages. Gender pay gap is a constant international problem, in which women are paid, on average, less than that of their male counterpart. As to if gender pay gap still exist, its exactness fluctuates depending on numerous factors such as professional status, country and regional location, gender, and age. In regards to gender, in some cases, both men and women have stated that the gap does not exist. Due to various countries initiatives to shrink the wage inequality between men and women wages in the work force, the gap has narrowed, respectively, which may have helped form such opinion. However, stating that the gender pay gap does not exist in today’s society, anywhere, is completely unlikely. Seeing that the gap has loosened its grasp in the working world, in other countries, the gap between pay has widen or remained stagnant. One cannot help but wonder why the gap remains consistent even with such substantial progress made in countries where the gap has decreased.
Throughout the history of the world, discrimination has always existed in some shape or form. It could be race, gender, religion, or anything that makes one person different from another but there is one discrimination problem that the world still faces today which happens to take place in the work force. This one issue that plagues women all around the world, especially in Canada is gender wage gap. The definition of wage gap is the difference in rates of pay between two different groups of people which in this case is men and women. Canadian working women are making almost $8000 less a year than men doing an equivalent job which is double the global average.
Did you know that on average in the workforce women are still getting paid less than men? Men are still getting paid more than women.It's true according to American Association of University Women, “Women are getting paid on average 78 cents for every dollar that a man makes.” This is astonishing considering that women make up over half of the workforce. Women bring home less money each day, it means they have less for the everyday needs of their paid more for a family families, and over a lifetime of work, far less savings for retirement. Over 49,000,000 children depend on a woman's salary according to New York Times. IWPR research shows that, irrespective of the level of qualification, jobs predominantly done by women pay less on average than jobs predominantly done by men. As this statistic is true, its only true when men and women do the same job with the same amount of just as every thing else's men as women but typically women and men go in
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.
About 75 percent of the 68 million women working in the United States will become pregnant at some point in their careers. Women with children are one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. labor force. In 1975, 47% of women with children under the age of 18 were employed; by 2008, this number grew to a notable 71% (Miner et al. 60). Compared to other workers, mothers are often viewed as less competent, less productive, and less committed to their job, which is assumed to result in increased absenteeism and resignation (Byron and Roscigno 5). Also, employers may doubt a mother’s ability to balance their work and home lives (Nunenmacher and Schnepf 172). A study conducted by Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik found that mothers were 79% less likely to be hired, 50% less likely to be promoted, and offered $11,000 less in salary than identical women without children. In the study, the subjects revealed that they assumed the mothers to be inherently less competent and less committed (Williams and Cuddy 96). Given these statistics, discrimination against mothers is one of the strongest forms of gender bias.