Summary: The Gender Pay Gap

The average woman in the United States makes approximately $82.90 for every dollar their male counterparts make. (Elsesser). While those 20 cents may seem inconsequential to you, they add up. Losing that much money all year can be the difference between someone living in poverty, and someone living a nice life. The gender pay gap is the cause of this problem. Around the world, women are losing money just because of what gender they are. The gender wage gap is a huge problem, that can only be solved by going to extreme measures, such as requiring people to release their employees wage gap and passing new laws.

Simultaneously, the gender pay gap has financial effects not just on the women, yet their families too. Studies have shown that American families with children count on a women’s earnings as a massive part of their family’s income, and many are the head of the household. Data demonstrates that “seventy percent of mothers with children under 18 participate in the labor force, with over 75 percent employed full-time. Mothers are the primary or sole earners for 40 percent of households with children under 18 today, compared with 11 percent in 1960. Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force has climbed since WWII: from 32.7 percent in 1948 to 56.8 percent in 2016” (Dewolf). Now women make up more than half of the U.S. workforce, the gap in earning deciphers to $7968 per year in median earnings for a high school graduate, $11,616 for a college graduate, and $19,360 for a professional school graduate. By and large, this gap effects hundreds of millions of women and their families, and lag them back hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout their life.

The gender pay gap is the difference in pay earned by men and the pay earned by women.( Pay Equity Commission, 2012). There are various ways in measuring the pay gap between genders, such as full- time or full- year wage. Statistics Canada data ( 2012) displayed that the gender pay gap in Ontario was 26% for full- time and full- year employments, which means for every C$1 earned by a man, a woman earned 74 cents( Pay Equity Commission,2012).The pay gap has been narrowing slowly over time compared to the how it was in 1987, which was 36%. However the gender wage gap is still a problem that exists in the society. I will discuss about the feminist theory and how it can be interpreted in the gender pay gap of our society, especially in regards to celebrities.

The gender pay gap is the difference between male and female earnings averaged in percentages. This difference in pay due to gender seems like it would be an obsolete practice in the twenty-first century, but it is real and is affecting millions of women and households in the country. In 2014, women working full time in the United States were paid 79 percent on average of what men were being paid, which is a gap of approximately 21 percent. This means that in the United States, females earned 94 cents on average to every dollar earned by males. According to one study by the Department of Labor’s Chief Economist, a typical 25-year-old woman working full time would earn $5,000 less over the course of her working career than a typical 25-year old man working in the same career. The reason why this pay gap exists does expand into other factors such as education, experience, the work being performed, qualifications, age, and ethnicity which are taken into account. The studies being conducted on the pay gap has economists verifying that discrimination is the best overall explanation and factor of the difference in pay between males and females.

Seventy-seven cents to the dollar. A simple phrase used to describe the gender pay gap. Most people who use this phrase in casual conversation do not really know what this entails. It is much more than men earning more than women. The significance of this pay discrepancy becomes much more apparent when looking at the bigger picture. Over an entire lifetime of working, a woman making only 77 cents to the male dollar loses a total of $1.2 million dollars over the course of her working life (Murphy & Graff, 2005). A risk of poverty for women living with a pay gap is high. According to the European Commission, the at-risk-of-poverty rate is around 22 percent for women, compared to the 16 percent of men.

Today, the working industry has made substantial progress towards gender equality pay while adding numerous career opportunities for woman in the workforce. However, society still poses ethical concerns between women and men regarding gender pay gap and discrimination for the same job function that apparently still exist. To put it differently, women regrettably have struggled as they continue in trying to make headway in gaining the respect of the working-class industry since the mid-1900’s. In some cases, researchers state that women in the workforce will not get paid equally for the same job function because of discrimination of gender gap. According to one research study, “there is still a gender pay gap. Women continue to earn considerably less than men on average” (Blau & Kahn, 2007, p. 8). While men have the higher ground of work tenure there should be equal pay for women with the same qualifications; I will argue the concerns of gender gap pay while using the utilitarian theory, deontological theory and the objection of moral reasoning to prove the ethical theory.

So what is the wage gap? The wage gap is the median earnings of men and the median earnings of women summed up and compared, no other variables were controlled for this study. After all the data was collected, it was found that women make 78 cents to every dollar a man makes. Feminists use this study to prove there is still inequality and that this inequality is due to discrimination, even though it is illegal to discriminate pay based on gender or race. Are feminists correct, are women really being discriminated against in the workplace? The short answer is no, the gap is due to the different choices the average woman makes. Which can be shown if we look at people in their early to late 20s, women in this age range out earn their male

The Huffington post (n.d) notes that in 2015, and on average, women still make 78 cents to a man's dollar. A new report goes beyond that oft-quoted statistic and examines this discrepancy along racial, geographical and educational lines. The American Association of University Women's (AAUW) "The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap" report breaks down the wage gap in every state, including Washington D.C., using data from 2013. The U.S. capital comes closest to pay equity, with women earning an average of 91 percent of the wages that men do. At the bottom of the list is Louisiana, where women earn just 66 percent of what men do. The report also found that women of color continue to be hit hardest by the gender wage gap. Asian-American women

Moreover, there is evidence that although discrimination against women in the labor market has declined, some discrimination does still continue to exist."(www.wikipedia.com).A wide ranging meta-analysis by Doris Weichselbaumer and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer (2005) of more than 260 published adjusted pay gap studies for over 60 countries has found that, from the 1960s to the 1990s, raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially from around 65 to 30% The bulk of this decline, however, was due to better labor market endowments of women (2005). The 260 published estimates show that the unexplained or discriminatory component of the gap has not declined over time. Using their own specifications, Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebmer found that the yearly overall decline of the gender pay gap would amount to a slow 0.17 log points, implying a slow level of convergence between the wages of men and women (American Progress 2012). According to economist Alan Manning of the London School of Economics, the process of closing the gender pay gap has slowed substantially and women could earn less than men for the next 150 years because of discrimination and ineffective government policies. A 2011 study by the British CMI revealed that if pay growth continues for female executives at current rates, the gap between the earnings of female and male executives would not be closed until 2109.

In Australia over the last 20 years, it is documented that a person’s income and wages, differs based on one’s gender, known as the gender pay gap (The Conversation, 2017; Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), 2017c). This paper will discuss what a gender pay gap is, various economic explanations for this gap, summarise sociological responses, and identify possible policy recommendations and their implications.

In his article, Truth and Myth on the Gender Pay Gap, Steven Horwitz elaborates on the confusion about what is true regarding the gender pay gap. Stating that, “Whether the gender pay gap is a myth depends upon exactly what claim either side is making.” (1) Making the claim that depending on what one says about the gap determines whether or not it is true or false. He goes on to elaborate on what is a myth. Saying, “Why would people claim this is a myth? Two reasons. First, if the critics are claiming that the 80% number means that when men and women with the exact same skills and experience and preferences do the exact same work that women get paid 80 cents for every dollar men do, they are wrong. That is not what the 80% figure shows.” (1) He says that the difference in pay is not how the media and other makes it seem to be, that for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 80 cents etc, and that the difference is actually explainable by the different and varied life choices that men and women make.

The gender wage gap has been a problem for years, however, even after identifying the issue, little progress has been made to fix it. While there are currently many efforts to push women into physical sciences and higher wage-earning jobs, only time will tell the results of these efforts. Despite these pushes, the reason behind little success being made may result from one of many other factors contributing to women’s future career decisions. For instance, women, “position themselves differently for careers, marriage, and parenthood while sharing an ideology of gender difference” (67 Gendered Futures). In other words, women plan their futures based on the desires to have children. While this idea is not inherently bad, the dangerous part of the ideology is that women further believe there is an, “Incompatibility between motherhood and full-time careers” (70 Gendered Futures). Furthermore, this causes women to commit less to their education, but moreso there post-educational jobs. But aside from simply those women who become tied down by toxic, future marriage ideologies, there are other factors that reflect the difference in pays.

The United Kingdom (UK) or Britain is fenced by the Atlantic Ocean, UK is positioned in the North-west of Europe. It is on top 11th largest country in Europe as well as the 22nd-most populous country, with an approximated 64.5 million inhabitants. The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance Its capital city is London which has an excellent potential financially with an urban population of 10,310,000. London the fourth-largest city in Europe and second-largest in the European Union. The gender gap in the work place shows the difference between the average earnings of men and women as a percentage of men’s earnings. The overall UK gender pay gap of 19.1% shows that a woman, on average, earns around

It is important to address the systemic inequalities of the gender pay gap. To do this, this essay will use Bacchi (2006) approach to analyse the text “Speech to HRINZ: The reasons for the Gender Pay Gap” by MP Paula Bennett. This essay will illustrate the theoretical perspective of liberal feminism to show the understanding of the problem, and the solutions of the gender pay gap. This essay will also look at two other theoretical perspectives, social democratic, and anti-racism and discuss their viewpoints and solutions towards the problem.

Inequality has been a dilemma for several years in countless different ways. A persistent problem with disproportion of income between women and men has been lingering within many companies in the United States. It has been said that women earn less money than men in the workplace for many different reasons. Some of these reasons are that women have not spent enough time in the office to be rewarded with raises and bonuses because they are busy with their home lives and taking care of their children, they, unlike men, have been taught to be timid and unaggressive which ultimately steers them away from requesting higher pay, or they do not meet the qualifications to receive promotions (Hymowitz, 2008). This essay is in response to On