Gender Based Wage Gap

It is unacceptable that a whole group of people receive less money simply because of their gender and we have to change this fact if we wish to be competitive in the world today. For example, we have made some progress in addressing this issue, in late January of 2009; President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This law sought to help address the unequal pay gap by restoring the protection against pay discrimination that was taken away by the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2007 case Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. While this law certainly was a step in the right direction, it did not go far enough to fully fix this problem in our society. A rather simple solution would be to pass a law mandating that all employers pay their workers equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender.

The working status of women has fluctuated greatly in America’s history, with jobs being denied to and kept from them. At this point, women have mostly secured their place in the job market, but there are other obstacles that remain; for example, the wage gap still persists, and while women can work alongside men, they are still seen as being inferior to them. Due to these negative factors, working women are not only expected to happily work alongside men - they are expected to work harder than them to prove their place. This higher expectation has lead to negative effects in women’s history, socioeconomic relations, and their health. Historical Lens The lack of availability of jobs for women throughout American history lead to a stigma for

The idea of the wage gap has been used to strengthen the need for feminism by convincing people that there is still sexism in the work place that can be fixed with a protest or a bill, although I will admit that there is sexism is the workforce, as of now it is not something that can be easily fixed with a bill, being that the sexism that is left is all just person to person and what the employers opinion

“According to the social security administration, women's average annual pay in 1937 was $525, compared with $1,027 for men” (“Working women in the 1930s”). This illustrates the huge wealth gap between women and men. Shows that women not only worked long hours, but also were paid less. Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “practically every woman, whether she is rich or poor, is facing today a reduction of income” (Ware). Proves that even rich women were treated unfairly when it came to wages.

Women and men deserve to be treated, and paid, equally. Sure, they are biologically different, and both genders have something they do better than the other, but this hasn 't stopped women from getting to the same level as men. Overall, one gender is not better than the other. We are one and the same. If women and men are doing the exact same job and have equal qualifications, then they shouldn 't be titled as inferior.

Even though women 's lives improved during the 1920s in many ways, they still faced inequality in the workplace. Women gained the right to vote and new freedom in the 1920 's, but they were still discriminated against in the workplace. They were prevented from most well-paying jobs and middle and upper-class white women were expected to stay home instead. Most poorer women still held jobs that were low paying and struggled to work to support themselves and their families. Women worked longer hours and got paid significantly less than men did.

No depression" (Ware 5). Norman Cousins explained his view on women taking jobs, the concept of blaming women for The Great Depression didn't help his repuation. Most of the time, women had no other choice but to work. Today, women have achieved positions that would not have been possible in the 1930's. From The Great Depression, women should evaluate the evolution of the average "Rosie The Riveter"; for without her, the symbol of hope would just be a fairytale.

One such form of discrimination that needs to be accounted for as Palmer points out is maternal profiling. At times companies may profile women and assume at some point in their career they are going to have and raise children. Due to this assumption the company will invest less human capital in women, which is less training, maybe not promoting them or giving them responsibility etc. Thus, in dual income families when a couple does decide to have children a caregiver is usually picked, this job is usually given to the spouse who makes less income as the spouse who makes more is seen as a more valuable asset to the family. So in the end because of this the profiling company creates self fulfilling prophesies by paying women less they are pigeonholed into giving up their jobs when a family does come into the picture.

Throughout the years the pay gap has narrowed but it’s still not equal pay for equal work. More importantly, employers depriving women of the right for equal pay, solely, because the employee is a woman is discriminatory based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A twenty percent difference adds up quickly, for example, according to Kathryn Vasel, “Woman working

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the intelligence testing practice of the Duke Power Company. The Supreme Court decision secures that employees may challenge not only overt discrimination but also job-selection procedures that are irrelevant to quantify job capability. In addition, according to the Cindy Hounsell (2002) report, “Women in U.S., on average, earn 72 cents to every dollar earned by men. In her lifetime the average women loses $523,000 due to wage disparities. Since 1987 women owned businesses have increased by 103 percent.