Name: Alejandra Aguilera
Date:
Teacher’s Name:
Subject: Language B
Word count: 1186
THE GENDER WAGE GAP IN THE UNITED STATES
Introduction
Today’s society continues to argue about the subject of social inequalities even in cosmopolitan and first world countries like United States. Gender inequality is a subject that have been forgotten eventually since the women civil rights movement developed and they started gaining an equal right for work. Still, in U.S history, gender inequalities remain till today in relation to the workplace to some degree. The Gender Wage gap is considered a gender inequality, but could be also a result of the interaction of many factors such as education, hours of work, career, etc. Indeed, by definition it is a “statistical indicator” of the amount of money women’s earn in relation to men’s work salaries and calculated by dividing the median annual earnings of women with the median annual earnings of men (Brunner and Rowen, 2012; OECD).
The Wage Gap over History
Over history, after World War, I women had to take men’s work in factories till men came back from war. In addition, The National War Labor Board in 1942 agreed that they had to pay women and men equally for the same work and hours of work, but when men came back from war this did not happened and women had to leave their jobs to make room for men’s work. Thus, until 1960, newspapers presented articles to encourage women to take specific jobs different than men. For example, the New York Times published a wide amount of articles about homemaking to motivate women to stay at home and serve their husband and family. Besides, the different pay scales already existed, women with full time jobs gained between 59 and 64 cents from a dollar that men earned in the same job.
Later, on June 10, 1963 the Equal Pay act was exposed to claim that women could not receive a lower pay than male
References: Brunner,B., & Rowen, B. (2012). The Equal Pay act: A History of Pay Inequity in the U.S. Pearson Education Database 2007. Retrieved from http://www.infoplease.com/spot/equalpayact1.html Berman, J. (April 8, 2014). WSJ Op-Ed Page Not Too Sure About This 'So-Called Gender Wage Gap '. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/08/gender-pay-gap-op-ed_n_5110934.html Chen, P. (June 28, 2012) Among Doctors, Too, Women Are Paid Less. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/among-doctors-too-women-are-paid-less/?action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults&mabReward=relbias%3Aw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry167%23%2Fpay+discrepancy Eilperin, J. (April 8, 2014) Obama takes executive action to lift the veil of ‘pay secrecy’. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/04/08/obama-takes-executive-action-to-lift-the-veil-of-pay-secrecy/ Jagsi, R., Griffith, K.A., Stewart, A., Sambuco, D., DeCastro, R. & Uberl, P.A. (2012) Gender Differences in the Salaries of Physician Researchers. The Journal of the American Medical Association Vol 307, No. 22. Retrieved from http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1182859 Pew Research Social & Demographic trends (December 11, 2013). On Pay Gap, Millennial Women Near Parity: For Now Despite Gains, Many See Roadblocks Ahead. Retrieved from: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-millennial-women-near-parity-for-now/ U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014) Women in the Labor Force: A Databook (Report 1049). BLS Reports. Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2013.pdf