Why Are Women Paid Less

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MBA ACM 681
Critical reading - Why Women Are Paid Less?

3. The most important information in this articles are there is an increase of women participation in the labor, and there has also been a transformation of wages, overall, women are still paid less than men.
• In 1950, only about one-third of working age women were in employment. Today there are nearly 60 percent of working age women are employed.
• In 1950, median earnings of women were only men’s two third. Nowadays, women earn 80 percent of what men paid.
• An employer who hired only women could cut labor cost by 20 percent. The employer could earn 14 percent more simply from hiring women.

There are several factors that made women paid less than men other than gender

Women tend to work in industries that are less subject to job losses than men, which lead to much lower paying. In the recent recession, 6 million men lost their jobs, while only 2.7 million women loss theirs.
• Men has twice the chance to sacrifice their time to work more than 50 hours per week than women. Average paid workweek for men is about 15 percent longer than it is for women. Men also more likely to work full time than women.
• In dental industry, which are mostly self-employed businesses, women dentist charge 24 percent cheaper than male dentist.

5. The key ideas we need to understand in this article are labor force participation rate, profit, gender discrimination, gender pay gap, compensating differential and occupational fatalities. By these ideas the author means as below:
Labor force participation rate: The number of working age people who are employed or seeking for employment.
Profit: Money that is made in a business, after subtracted by all the costs and expenses.
Gender discrimination: The unequal treatment based on people’s gender.
Gender pay gap: The difference between men and women

The most important information in this article is Massachusetts women think that they’re being fairly compensated. But in fact those women aren’t earning as much as the men they work with.
• The Harvard economist Claudia Goldin stated that women in Massachusetts are paid $10,000 more than women in the United States. “Women are earning more than anywhere in the U.S. except for Connecticut.” Said Claudia Goldin.
• The American Association of University Women (AAUW) ranked Massachusetts 37th in the nation in term of wage equity. Women in Massachusetts only earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes.

The problem started in the boardroom, where it lacks female presence who could promote fair pay and advancement for women. There are gender biases on women due to little rules about compensations in the high level management. There is also social cost that women has to pay when negotiating their wages.
• The Boston Club stated that only 12.7 percent of local-business board members are women.
• 35 of the commonwealth’s 100 largest public companies have no women member in the boardroom, including the oil company Global Partners and the tech giant