Mia Watson
Honors English
Shupe 3A
7 December 2016
Many people have wondered what the gender wage gap is. The wage gap is when a man gets paid more than a woman does for the same amount of work. In the United States the wage gap is a topic of much controversy. Some people believe that the wage gap has less to do with gender discrimination but with career choices, the likeliness to negotiate pay raises, and career pauses. In some cases these are true but there are quite a few cases are due to gender discrimination. Women and men should be paid the same amount for doing the same amount of work.
Women today are breaking down social standards. There are more working full time jobs. Women are actually earning more degrees than men, (Perry). So education obviously isn’t the problem. If women have been earning more degrees than their should logically be more women in the workforce and so it should be a social norm that women are paid equally.
The overall
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Women’s pay significantly increased in the 1970’s. This was largely due to more women getting degrees. Since then however the gap decreases very little annually. “At the rate of change between 1960 and 2015, women are expected to reach pay equity with men in 2059,” (Miller). Women cannot wait for the gap to fix itself. It will take simply too much time for families that need the money their mother makes, they need that money now not in about 43 years when it has fixed itself.
One thing about the wage gap is that it does grow over time. This fact which is largely cited as gender discrimination is actually false. Men are typically more likely to negotiate their salary than women. It also goes back to when women were working they were not typically paid very much. This is because it was seen that a man should be the primary breadwinner for the family and that if the woman made more it was seen as an embarrassment to the family and