Argumentative Essay: Gender Equality In The Workplace

Monica Al Kassouf
201501516
Eng. 203 — Section #3
Farah Z. Aridi
Argumentative Essay
December 9, 2014

Gender Equality

Jane and Joe both graduated from the same school and the same university. They studied the same courses and got the same grades. Joe, a man, got employed a month before Jane, a woman. They both have the same job position now but Joe, a man, gets a higher salary than Jane, a woman. Gender equality in the workplace is a widely discussed topic especially in the United States where people claim that there is gender equality. Gender equality should be enforced in the workplace because men and women have equal abilities and they both deserve the same pay when they are doing the same job.

Men often believe that they are superior

When a woman gives birth, she is given her maternity leave which leaves her job position vacant for several weeks and she often takes extra weeks off to stay with her newborn baby for a longer time. When an employer wants to hire someone, he/she would want a stable employee therefore hiring a man is the best choice. A man wouldn’t skip a day at work because of a sick child or a family dinner at his place, while a woman would. In addition to maternity leave, women, especially married women, are often absent at work because of certain family related issues or events. These reasons lead employers to hire men more than women and even pay them more sometimes. The article “40% of managers avoid hiring younger women to get around maternity leave” published in The Guardian states, “A third of managers would rather employ a man in his 20s or 30s over a woman of the same age for fear of maternity leave, according to a new study. A survey of 500 managers by law firm Salter & Gordon showed that more than 40% admitted they are generally wary of hiring a woman of childbearing age, while a similar number would be wary of hiring a woman who has already had a child or hiring a mother for a senior role” (par. 1). However, the mentality that men should go to work while women should stay at home is changing nowadays. Women are not born to be housewives. They have the ability to hold job positions just as much as men do. And men have the ability to take care of the kids and the house just as much as women do. Frances O’Grady, as a reply to the survey, said, “It is illegal to not give someone a job on the grounds that they may have children in the future. Employers that do this are not only breaking the law but being incredibly stupid as they are missing out on many of the country’s brightest young