Equal Pay & The Wage Gap by: chelsea Tsasse

What is Wage inequality? --- overview

On average, Women earn less than men in nearly every single occupation for which is extremely Women are almost half of the workforce. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn less than men. According to Census Bureau," female full-time, year-round workers made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent." In my adobe flash page, I will be talking about why wage inequality must come to an end and answer some questions people have about the wage gap.

Wage inequality is when two individuals, in this case women and a man in a company do similar work at the same level of qualification yet are not paid equally, this is wage inequality. Such situations are illegal. They are considered extremly discriminatory. Wage discrimination occurs when individuals with the same education and working experience perform similar jobs, yet are paid differently. Due to their gender and sexual disposition, nationality, age, material status, and or race. Yet wage inequality tends to creep in. An example New York Times give us is "imagine a work situation where the manager puts the 'slick talking boy' into scale 2 right from the start and the 'timid girl' at the bottom scale 0, although she is equally qualified. This first wage scaling can haunt one for years. It is hard to say to what extent wage inequality exists. Several investigations speak of residual gender pay gaps that cannot be explained away." Possibly these unexplained gaps indicate wage discrimination. To complicate matters: such wage differences that can be linked to understandable causes may nevertheless be tainted with discrimination. It is difficult to put a finger on the sore spot. Wage inequality for similar work may occur within teams or departments, companies, and branches of industry. Similar work is compared in terms of the qualifications needed for its proper execution. Thus in principle men and women performing similar jobs or tasks should be rewarded equally, and receive the same hourly wages. This implies that their type of contract (fixed or not) or duration of their working week (part time or full time) cannot serve as a pretext for unequal remuneration.

Women are better off today, but are they still far from being equal with men?

The fight for equality on pay has been and ongoing issue in society, which has gained a lot of attention around the world, because there's still this issue on women not getting paid enough or as equal as men. According to The Census Bureau, "In the US, for the first time, in 2011, women made up slightly more than half of the workforce. There are (some) high-profile women chief executives. There is a small but increasing number of female presidents. Women are moving into jobs that used to be done by men. Even those women working in factories or sweatshops have more choice and independence than if they remained at home. But their experience is contradictory, As individual workers they experienced both the liberating or the “empowering” impact of earning a regular wage, and of having increased autonomy over their economic lives; at the same time many were also well aware of the fact that their work was low paid, both in comparison with male workers but also with women workers employed in industrialized countries." This contradiction is widespread – although more women are working, they are often still paid less than men, in part-time jobs or in the huge informal employment sector with little protection and few rights. In many places, the increase in women working is simply driven by the necessity of having two wages to make ends meet.

Same job, different pay?

When a women start moving into traditionally male-dominated positions, the pay falls: According to Global Agenda, “A 10% increase in proportion female is associated with .5% to 5% percent decrease in hourly wage in each decade,” An example would be, the world of computer programming. Historically a female-dominated field, men started to take over in the 1980s. And as they did, things changed: “When male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige,” Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times writes. It’s not a new observation. Twenty years ago, Gloria Steinem was writing about the phenomenon: “Categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require – or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market – than by the sex, race and class of most of their workers.” But for a new generation of women who thought this was a thing of the past, it will be disappointing to see just how far we still have to go

Are women paid less because they choose lower-paying jobs?

A majority of the pay gap between men and women comes from differences within occupations, not between them — and widens in the highest-paying ones like business, law and medicine, according to data from Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor economist and a leading scholar on women and the economy. The wage gap cannot be explained by saying women just don’t have the right experience or ambition for the highest-paying jobs. Bloomberg Business week looked at nearly 10,000 of this year’s male and female MBA graduates, who are usually young and childless, ambitious, and all of whom had a full-time job lined up. Despite the fact that this weeds out those have different work experience, seek flexibility in order to care for children, want part-time jobs, or just don’t aim for the top, a women's starting salary were almost $15,000 less than those for men. While the analysis finds that women are more likely to go into lower paying fields, even within industries they’ll be paid less. In 17 of 22 industries, women were offered less starting money than men. In finance, for example, women’s salaries were $22,000 lower, while they were $12,300 lower in tech and $11,500 in consulting. This problem dogs all female graduates, not just those leaving business programs. Women who graduate college will get lower starting salaries than men in their first year even when their schools, grades, majors, jobs, and hours worked are taken into account. At any education level, a man will make more than a woman. He’ll also make more in any industry — including female-dominated ones — and virtually every job. Even women with higher high school GPAs, who should be making more, will earn less than men with lower grades. Some of women’s choices certainly do play a role in the wage gap, a big one being the fact that they are much more likely to interrupt their careers to care for children than men. But only about 10 percent of the gap between women’s and men’s wages can be explained by different work histories, or in other words, career interruptions. Even young, childless women make less than their male peers. In fact, many studies of the wage gap have come up with an “unexplained” portion, which is where bias may exist.

MLA Citations.

Noguchi, Yuki. "50 Years After The Equal Pay Act, Gender Wage Gap Endures." NPR. NPR, 10 June 2013. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

Miller, Claire Cain. "Pay Gap Is Because of Gender, Not Jobs." The New York Times. The New York Times, 23 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

"The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap (Spring 2017)." AAUW: Empowering Women Since 1881. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

Campbell, Cate Scott. "The Limit Does Not Exist: On A Pi Note With Dr. Eugenia Cheng." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 13 Mar. 2017. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

Definitions

ambitious- having or showing a strong desire and determination to succeed.

contradiction-a combination of statements, ideas, or features of a situation that are opposed to one another.

autonomy- (of a country or region) the right or condition of self-government, especially in a particular sphere.

remuneration- money paid for work or a service.

prestige- widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality.

Wage inequality- Income inequality is the unequal distribution of household or individual income across the various participants in an economy. Income inequality is often presented as the percentage of income to a percentage of population.

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