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Gender wage gap and inequality
What are the causes and impacts of the wage gap between males and females in the workplace
Gender pay gap introduction
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165,948,282. Why is this number significant? This number represents an approximation of how many women live in the United States. 57% of this number represents women that are of age to participate in the workforce. Women represent almost half of America's workforce, receive more college and graduate degrees than men, are the lone or co-provider in half of American families with children yet, they continue to make 80 cents to every dollar a man makes. This concept is called the Gender wage gap. The Gender wage gap is the measure of pay disparity between men and women. Causes: The Gender wage gap Although women have made advances towards a closing to the gender wage gap, unequal pay is still prevalent. The Gender Wage Gap is influenced
Gender disparity impacts numerous aspects of everyday life. It influences our work or interactions with others and our home life. It impacts our work by the jobs and positions that certain genders obtain and their salaries. Likewise, it controls how we react to others based on expectations made for our gender. For instance, those who work in customer service tend to be female and are expected to be kind to put customers at ease. It impacts families through the division of work given to spouses based on their gender or perhaps their income. Although it is not as prevalent today as it was throughout history, it still exists. Until about the twentieth century, women were not allowed to join the work force. Society believed that women should stay at home and tend to household duties while men must go out and work. However as time went on, more women began to take on the task of having a paying job. It was essential that women joined the work force in order to close the gender gap that existed in jobs. Currently, “we have nearly achieved equality in the proportion of women and men in the ...
Department of Labor, “women comprise 47% of the total U.S. labor force, with the largest
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).
Wage inequalities are not a result of women’s qualifications or choices. Wage discrimination persists despite women’s increased educational attainment, greater level of experience in workforce, and decreased amount of time spent out of the workforce raising children.
The notion of a gender pay gap has existed for decades, this is because countless studies seek to justify why average women earn less than men. This unit exposes underlining factors which determine whether the gender pay gap exists in the contemporary Western hemisphere. The scholarly field that correlates to this unit is economics and gender studies.
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.
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.
A number of factors have contributed to the gap between men’s and women’s wages. These include: occupational segregation of women into low paying jobs; lower levels of unionization for women and attitudinal barriers that have kept women from achieving equality in the workplace and undervaluation for women’s work.
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 widened 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. Reasons as to why gender wage gap exist so heavily, slightly differs from country to country, but the overall effect from the wage disparity is wholly evident.
Research suggests that “gender discrimination continues to exist in today’s workplace” in regard to salaries, promotions, and other opportunities (Sipe, Johnson, & Fisher, 2009). There have been misconceptions about women in the workplace. Their productivity, commitment, and effectiveness. Whether it be conscious or unconscious, most employers believe that women are inferior to men in the work place. This is easily seen in working mothers, especially when a woman comes back from maternity leave. Employers and colleagues believe that work is not a priority anymore once a woman has children. It is also believed that women are not as hard working as their male counterparts. In a study examining the salary differences a male and female employee with the same qualifications and experience showed that in one case “gender was a significant influence on salary with a $18,012 difference between men and women” (Lane & Flowers, 2015). This study also concludes that the only way to eradicate the wage gap is through legislation that have punitive measures for discrimination based on gender. Gender discrimination and the gender wage gap are very important to recognize because they are having a huge detrimental impact on women in the
Today in the United States, men make more than women in various sectors, including education and other trades favoring women workers. The gap gets bigger when comparing the wages earned by men to those of women in jobs favoring men workers such as construction or other physically demanding jobs. Women are less likely to work those jobs, therefor; men have the advantage of having more experience and get paid better. In addition, employers would rather hire a man instead of a woman because they believe that a man will be able to sustain the difficulty of the job and work longer hours which crate a disadvantage for women because they are unable to gain experience and become skilled in that certain field. Gender pay gap based on this information is explained as the result of the discrimination of employers toward the feminine sex in terms of pay, which discourage them to work certain jobs leading to create a bigger gap due to the lack of
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (2012), in 2011, women accounted for 47 percent of the workforce (ages 16 and over). Their occupations varied, as well as their marital status and their status as a mother.
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).
Gender Inequality at a Workplace 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 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.