Did you know that After almost one hundred years of women rights, women still earn 79 cents to a man’s dollar? Some people may think that the gender pay gap deserves to be there because women don’t work as much as men because they leave more often for things such as pregnancy. I believe that this statement isn’t fair at all. This is one side of the argument to which I disagree. In a lot of jobs, women work just as hard as men and they still do not get paid as much. Pregnancy shouldn’t stop a person from earning as much money. The pay gap needs to disappear along with these unfair excuses. The government and citizens need to step up to tackle this issue.
Pregnancy shouldn’t stop women from getting paid as much as men. Why should something natural stop someone from earning as much money? This is why I believe that women need to be paid the same amount even if they are pregnant so that this pay gap can close. In my opinion, women should be the ones who deserve more attention when they’re being paid. A 2017 study found that men are likely to stay in a full-time job for their whole of their lives, while a lot of women go part-time to care of children or elderlies. They need the extra money to take care of babies or their parents. According to the book, Hidden Inequalities in the Workplace, “most men still engage in full-time employment (or self-employment) for the majority of the life course, while over 40% of women report part-time work. The need to undertake unpaid work, including housework, childcare (parenting and grandparenting) and ill/elderly care, remains a particular constraint to women’s participation in paid work” (181-214). Imagine women not being able to take care of their families just because they get paid less.
Women are already more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety than men. Think of what would happen to someone if they realized that they were earning less money than a male counterpart. According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information, when a women’s “income was less than the matched male counterpart, odds of both disorders were significantly higher among women versus men.”
The gender wage gap has been there since women started earning money for jobs. It’s the 21st century. Why is it still there? Women still earn 79 cents to a man’s dollar! On June 10, 1963, the Equal Pay Act was put into place. Now, 55 years later, our country’s still struggling with this issue. The government now isn’t making much of a move on this. Obama proposed an act that would have made it easier for women to identify whether they were being paid less than male counterparts at work. It would have made the income results transparent. In 2017, Donald Trump suspended this act because his administration thought that it would not have worked. Ariane Hegewisch, The program director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said: ‘If you look at companies that already have to monitor themselves voluntarily, they typically do find issues that need fixing.” Even though we are getting into more modern times with more activists and newer thoughts, the process of closing the gender wage gap based on median annual earnings has slowed. It would take until 2059 for women and men to reach earnings equality if the rate of transformation in the annual earnings ratio between women and wen were to continue at the same rate as it has since 1985.
This gap isn’t the same in every job. Women earn less money than male counterparts in all but five jobs in the world. This means that the job a woman has can also affect the male to female income ratio. For example, in Marketing and sales managers, men make 45 percent more per year than women in the same job. In Software developers, applications and systems software jobs, men make 16 percent more than women every year. The percentages vary from job to job which means that the gap is farther for some women.
This problem corresponds to racism in jobs. In general, Caucasian women earn more money than Hispanic women so when people say that women earn 79 cents to a man’s dollar, they are talking about a White woman’s salary. This means that women who are African American or Hispanic have it worse. Hispanic women only receive 62.2 percent of a white man’s median weekly earnings. A Hispanic women’s average weekly earnings last year was only 62.2 percent of White men’s median weekly earnings which was $603 per week of full-time work. The median weekly earnings of an African American woman was only 67.7 percent of White men’s earnings which was $657 per week.
Why is the government not doing anything to close this gap? It’s time for more people to stand up to this problem! For example, the equal rights amendment needs to be backed up by the government. Shining a light on the gap and making pay results more transparent could make a difference in someone’s life.
