Gender Wage Gap Essay

413 Words2 Pages

The day following the inauguration hundreds of thousands of men and women descended upon the capital marching in the Women’s March. One of their chief concerns was the gender wage gap. According to the US Census Bureau on average women make 79 cents to the man 's dollar. Women have long fought for equal pay, and the wage gap has shrunk with the institution of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Still as the election has turned the tide in a more conservative direction, many women fear that the wage gap will be overlooked and no further progress will be made. However, critics of the wage gap argue that wage gap calculations are inaccurate dramatizations, and cause unnecessary riffs between male and female coworkers.
The gender wage gap is determined by dividing the annual median income of females working full time by the annual median income of males working full time. How Stuff Works.com by Melanie McManus explains how this calculation can be misrepresentative because the overall wage gap does not compare gender wage gaps within the in the same occupation. McManus points …show more content…

However, the article does not address the wage gaps that do exist when you compare salaries between men and women in the same field. For example, according to fortune.com, female surgeons make 69.4% of their male counterpart’s weekly salaries. For female surgeons, financial advisors, teachers, and police officers and various other careers the wage gap is higher than the national average; a gap so significant that it cannot be explained solely by a difference in educational and employee background. McManus wants wage gap advocates to understand that the national wage gap may be dramatized and misunderstood, however, when you dig deeper into there is still a gender wage gap that cannot be explained by career or background