The Gender Wage Gap Between Men And Women

Gender is a learned social construct, and from a young age, children are taught gender roles by society. From the connotations of the color pink and the color blue, to the toys they play with, to the ways they learn to behave, gender shapes the way human beings act. We are not born knowing that colors have associations with gender, that girls play with baby dolls and boys with toy trucks and toys, that men are better at math than women, that men are the problem-solvers and critical thinkers while women are emotional, that men are the bread-winners and women raise children, and so on. These stereotypes are taught to us and enforced by society in many ways we may or may not be aware of. These stereotypes are everywhere, from toys and cartoons, advertisements, pop culture, movies

Although this gap is slowly but surely closing, it is still ever-present. Women are almost half of the workforce. They are the sole or co-breadwinner in half of American families with children. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men. In 2015, female full-time, year-round workers made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent (Hegewisch 2016). Women, on average, earn less than men in nearly every single occupation for which there is sufficient earnings data for both men and women to calculate an earnings ratio. In middle-skill occupations, workers in jobs mainly done by women earn only 66 percent of workers in jobs mainly done by men. If change continues at the same slow pace as it has done for the past fifty years, it will take 44 years—or until 2059—for women to finally reach pay parity. For women of color, the rate of change is even slower (Hegewisch 2016). Such inequity in pay and financial opportunity for the same jobs further enforces marginalization and discrimination in both the work force and everyday