CLOSING THE GENDER PAY GAP
Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: Women, who are equally as competent, experienced and educated as men, are not being paid as much as men. This is the gender-pay gap, and it is continually played up in a number of reports that come out nearly every year. In 2014, The American Association of University Women found that women age 14 and older who worked full time in the United States earned only 79 percent of what men in those same jobs were paid.
Just two years later, a U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee report reiterated those statistics, reporting that a woman working full time earns $10,800 less per year than a man — a disparity that can add up to about $500,000 over a career. And women of color are often paid even less.
Worse yet, the Institute for Women’s Policy research says that while the gender pay gap is narrowing, at the current rate, it will not close — or “catch up,” so to speak — until 2059.
Women face pay gaps in almost every line of work, and jobs more traditionally associated with men often pay better than jobs that are traditionally seen as women’s work. Such stereotypes are known as occupational gender segregation. Sure, women who pursue jobs in predominantly “male” fields can improve their wages as a result, but this is not a definite solution to the problem. Women who try to pursue these careers can
face backlash for being perceived as too assertive or too strong or too unfeminine or too “anything” that restrains women by forcing stereotypes on those who want to succeed.
The reality of the gender wage gap makes evidence an undeniably clear example of the deep-seated and stillprevalent sexism experienced by working women. This affects me as a young woman, especially as a woman of color who will be paid less than what a white woman earns. So for anything I want to achieve in my career, I will have to work 10 times harder to get it.
Some might try to delegitimize the pay gap by arguing that the difference in men and women’s earnings may be because of a woman’s life choices, including the level of education and even the decision to bear children. The pay gap can also reflect choices made in both college majors and jobs. For example, women are still more likely than men to pursue teaching, a generally lower-paying job. And reports show that education is not always an effective solution to the problem either: At every level of education, women’s median earnings are less than men, though that can vary from woman to woman and the situation she is in. These studies show that just one year after graduating from college, women are paid just 82 percent of what men with the same education and experience level are paid. The typical woman with a bachelor’s degree earns $5,000 less per
year than the typical man with the same degree, for example.
And the pay gap grows with age: Women over the age of 35 only earn 76 percent of what their male counterparts earn.
We will never come up with a comprehensive solution to the gender pay gap problem unless we first acknowledge that it exists and that it is an issue that may not be easily fixed. If we ever want to close that gap completely, it is up to employers to exercise transparency in what they are paying their employees and the responsibility of our government to enforce rulings such as the Equal Pay Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (which restricts pay discrimination based on gender) and — hopefully — more such laws to come.
America is a country where countless career and learning opportunities exist, so I cannot accept letting less pay stop me from fighting for what I want to do. I have to be willing to resist the narrative of women being treated as less throughout their professional lives and not lose confidence in my own ability to follow any career path that I choose. In the interim, we must hold our government, our employers and ourselves accountable for creating this change.