The year the Equal Pay Act was passed into law (1963) the wage gap between a man and women working full time was 41 cents with women making 59 cents for every dollar a man earned. Since then, the income disparity has decreased by almost 50 percent. In 2014, the wage gap was 21 cents with women making 79 cents for every dollar a man earned (The Wage Gap Over Time). This 20 cent decrease in the wage gap since 1963 shows how significant of a difference the Equal Pay Act and its enforcement through Corning Glass Works v Brennan, along with other court cases, have been. The current 21 cent wage gap today shows that the issue of unequal pay based on sex still exists, and that more needs to be done to close this gap.
The main purpose of the article, “Equal Pay Day: When, where and why women earn less than men” by Dana Ford, is to inform the audience about the pay gap between genders that still exists in the United States today. To emphasize on the subject of gender pay gap, Ford shows the reader how race, age, and even the state the woman lives in could affect how big or small the pay gap is. While the speaker, Dana Ford, may use a negative tone toward the issue, this newdesk editor is also aware of the progress in equality in the past 50 years. Ford states that “The good news is that the gender pay gap is getting smaller. In 1964, women on average were paid 59% of what men were paid.
Did they win their fight, or are they fighting for no reason? Equal pay was always a struggle for women. When men and women in the same workplace got paid different amounts for the same amount of work it angered women. “The persistence of gender-based wage disparities — commonly referred to as the pay or wage gap — has been the subject of extensive debate and commentary.
While women make up half of today’s workforce, they make seventy-nine cents to every dollar a man makes ("Pay Equity & Discrimination." — IWPR. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Sept. 2016.). To put it in perspective, for every $60,000 a man makes, a women only makes $47,400. The Equal Pay Act of of 1963 prohibited companies from determining pay based on the gender of the worker.
In the 1960s, Julie Christie, a British actress once said, “I remember becoming aware of women 's issues and inequality. It became glaringly clear to me when I was living in America that women are regarded as less intelligent than men”. In the 1930s, this idea was expressed to an even greater extent by the American author, John Steinbeck in the novella, Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck epitomizes this idea of women being unequal to men through the example of Curley’s wife, the only woman living on an all-male ranch. She is discriminated against in many ways while she attempts to gain power over others.
However, women received half the amount of pay than that of men. All because they were seen as working for “pin money” which is extra money to spend on unnecessary things. The stereotypical ideal of women also affected their jobs. Men not only received a higher payroll, but also took supervisory roles from women.
The most shocking fact about this pay gap is that there are so many single mothers out there who need to feed, care for, and comfort their children. By only allowing women 77-80 cents on the dollar compared to men, it makes it much harder for these single
Females in the U.S. make just 78 cents to the dollar of what men make for doing the same work. Additionally, women around the world spend more hours a day working without pay. Furthermore, women have to pay more for household items and the United States, along with 8 other countries, doesn’t
Sometimes, women are not given the chance to make more money because employers think that men are stronger, smarter, or more experienced or skilled (Gender Differences 84). This obviously means that women do not get a fair chance to get higher paying jobs in some cases. However, women know how to fight and try to make things right. An example of this is in the article “Understanding the ‘‘Family Gap’’ in Pay for Women with Children”. Jane Waldfogel states that if women had “not increased their investments in education and experience, the gender pay gap would have widened in the 1980s simply due to the changes in the overall wage structure” (140).
Shining some much-needed sunlight on the gender wage gap will make a difference for every one of us, men and women, right now.” (www.nytimes.com, 16). “It’s the twenty-first century, and the gender wage gap affects the daily life of women throughout the country, at every economic level, from cashier to CEO. Is it fair? No.
Although some people do say that the myth of the wage gap is just that for all others there is something we can do. In Ann Crittenden review of Don 't Get Mad, Get Even: Book Review of Getting Even: Why Women Don 't Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It Crittenden argues that while women essentially are even with men in terms of education and experience, women still get the short end of the stick and get payed less then males. She claims that even with the blatant sexsim going on in most workplaces there is soemthing all women can do, demand their fair share. Now this might seem as a simple task but if it was childs play, then women would have been getting paid fairly since they entered the workforce back in the the 60’s. She develops this claim by stating research done by Evelyn Murphy a financial analyst.
The gender pay gap is a significant issue in the United States because it promotes institutional and internal sexism and the unfair treatment of human beings. An infamous statistic about the wage gap has been the 77 cent statistic, stating that for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns 77 cents. The statistic is calculated by, “...dividing the median earnings of full-time, year-round, working women by the median earnings of full-time, year-round, working men, all rounded to the nearest $100” (Glynn 2). This, however, represents males and females from all occupations, causing opponents to argue that, because it does not represent the gap between people who have the same job, a wage gap does not exist. Nonetheless, multiple studies have proven that a gender pay gap does exist within the United States.
It is said that because of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the gender wage gap no longer exists. Studies today show that the gender wage gap is still very much alive. In the 6th edition of Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings written by Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Shaw and Lee explain, “the gender wage gap is an index of the status of women’s earnings relative to men’s and is expressed as a percentage and is calculated by diving the median annual earnings for women by the median annual earnings for men” (Shaw and Lee 497). Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics in 2010 showed the ratio of women’s to men’s annual earnings were 77%. This means for every dollar a man made, a woman made 77 cents.
As of 2015 women are only making between $0.76 and $0.80 for every dollar men are making. The pay gap does vary by each job, CNBC says “Of course, the pay gap varies greatly by industry. The disparity was largest — nearly 30 percent — between men and women in finance and insurance, without controlling for job title, education and years of experience, among other factors,” click here for link. As you can see women are clearly paid less than men of the same career and 83% of women believe that along with 68% of men who feel they are being paid more as well. In addition to this women have come forward and explained how they are paid less than men who are their co-hosts, co-workers,
The gender wage gap results on women making less money than men do for doing the exact same job. In every occupational category there is a gender pay gap favouring full-time working men over full-time working women. The capacity of this gap depends on numerous factors like work, family and societal factors, including society’s stereotypes about the work that women and men expected to do in society’s view do and the way women and men ‘’should’’ engage in the workforce. This can lead to discrimination, both direct and indirect.
