Gender Pay Gap In America

The social problem that I am going to introduce is the gender pay gap. This social problem does not fit into the core American value of equality because, quite obviously, having a gap in pay between the genders does not fit the basic definition of “equality”. If all variables are accounted for, a woman, on average, makes 78 cents to every dollar a man makes. With simple math, we can see that there is a discrepancy of 22 cents between women and men’s respective pays. Since the United States was founded on the ideal of “equality for all”, one would presume that this basic principle would extend to equal pay for equal work as well. Since, clearly, this is not the case, it is vital that we change this aspect of our economic system around so that

In America, we have this thought that all people should be able to pick themselves out of poverty and despair if they work hard enough. As reasonable as this sounds on its own, the reality is much different. Those people who advocate for the above, more often than not, fail to take into account the stress and desolation that being in poverty forces upon you. Now, the gender pay gap is not crushingly depressing, but it is rather disheartening and fails to live up to another ideal of our Founders. Women cannot achieve social mobility when they lack the basic means to raise themselves up, money. So as long as women are receiving less money than their male counterparts in a myriad of jobs, they will be unable to attain true progress in moving up the socio-economic ladder. The gender pay gap, comparatively speaking to other social issues, is not such a difficult problem to fix, but it will require some real, sincere legislative effort on the part of our lawmakers and

It is unacceptable that a whole group of people receive less money simply because of their gender and we have to change this fact if we wish to be competitive in the world today. For example, we have made some progress in addressing this issue, in late January of 2009; President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This law sought to help address the unequal pay gap by restoring the protection against pay discrimination that was taken away by the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2007 case Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. While this law certainly was a step in the right direction, it did not go far enough to fully fix this problem in our society. A rather simple solution would be to pass a law mandating that all employers pay their workers equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender. If the employers failed to compensate their workers accordingly, then they could face some form of punishment, such as a fine. In addition to this, the various states could pass individual laws to shore up the national one to make certain that corporations and their owners adhere to fairer, more equal standards of pay. As with most social issues, the gender pay gap will not be fully addressed by our lawmakers until we, collectively, come together and demand that our representatives change the economic and social systems