The Argument For Equal Pay For Women

The debate for equal pay for women is not new, for it has gone on for decades. Women and men have fought for women's rights since 1848. Women have since gained the right to vote, Roe vs Wade, and in 1963 women earned the right to be paid equally to their male counterparts. Women are supposedly paid equally, yet women make 79 cents to every dollar a man makes. While there are many factors that contribute to women being paid less than men; there are also many reasons why we need to help fight to close the wage gap.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law The Equal Pay Act of 1963. This Act was established to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was created to help abolish the wage gap between men and women. The Equal Pay Act states
Today, four in ten women are either the sole or primary breadwinners for her family, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Yet women are still being told that they do not need to make as much as men because the men are the ones who support the families. One manager told a Plaintiff that "You don't need pay equity, you're married" (Lebowitz). This is false and it hurts single mothers. "Most of the mothers who are chief breadwinners for their families — nearly two-thirds — are single parents" (Rampell). These mothers do not have someone else contributing income for their family. The household is relying on her single income, and old stereotypes like this one only hurt single mothers and contribute to the wage gap. There are also stereotypes about the kind of work that is appropriate for women. These stereotypes hinder women's advancement in fields that are dominated by men. When many women make it into a field that was dominated by men that field is no longer considered prestigious or hard. This happened with the field of recreation, working in parks or leading camps, "which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points" (Cain Miller). This did not only happen in the field of recreation, but also in the field of design wages dropped by 34 percentage points; housekeeping wages dropped by 21 percentages points; and biology wages dropped by 18 percentage points. The opposite effect happens when a job that was predominately held by women attracts a lot of men. An example of this happened in the field of computer programming. This field was dominated by females, but when male programmers began to outnumber