Gender Wage Gap: Fact and Fiction

We have all heard the same stats over the last couple years: a woman makes 75 cents to every dollar that a man makes. I have been taught this in many different classes from a women and gender studies class to a communication law class. I have been told this by my mother and by family friends warning me about going into the workforce and making sure I stand up for myself in the workplace. Statistics get spouted at us on social media as more and more news outlets are covering women’s issues. Gender equality/inequality is a huge part of the news and more and more women are coming forward with accusations of sexual assault, which is also keeping women and their rights in the news. Hollywood has also helped bring this issue to light with female actresses making it known that their male co-stars are making more for doing the same job. Emmy Rossum of Shameless found out her male counterparts made more than she did and she often worked more them (article here). While most of us are not stars, this does still get explained as something that happens at the lower level. 

Up until now, I have believed all of these things without much question. I have looked at the stats and the charts and thought “well women have been screwed for years so this must be fact.” But I never fully investigated and researched these things for myself. An argument I am constantly met with is the fact that there are laws in place to prevent women from getting paid less than men. And even though this is true, there are many laws that are in effect that do not stop things from happening. People still commit small and large scale crimes against the laws in place to keep them from happening, so why assume that just since there is a law that says women can’t be paid less that everyone is listening? That all employers follow this law? Here is what I have found. 

Real quick before we dive in, I want to clarify what the gender wage gap is. This is the issue where women who are doing the same job as a man are getting paid less because they are female. This is not women who are teachers or nurses getting mad at men who are doctors or investment bankers making more money than them (also notice how in these examples its never the woman who gets to make more?) It seems like common sense that if one person is a partner at a law firm and another person works as a receptionist at the law firm, there will be a pay gap. The issue comes when there are two partners in a law firm, and the male partner gets the better cases and makes more money than the female partner. Sometimes it is even that maybe the two partners may be technically getting paid the same amount, but perhaps the male employee is getting more job advancement opportunities. Or pieces to write for a major news organization. Or even more cases in a law firm. From the beginning of time women have been deemed the more caring and emotional ones and therefor unable to handle harder and more important jobs. 

Lets visit that law that says women are not allowed to get paid less than men, shall we? Everyone always seems to be focused on laws, but there are many ways around them and the woman would have to have evidence. This would mean that she would have to ask around to other people and see how much they were getting paid. Then take on her boss and her company who can afford a better lawyer. Even if the law is technically there, there are loop holes to go around to make it so they do not have to adhere to it. There is no perfect system in place to keep these things from happening. 

In 1963, the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act was passed. It starts out by making sure that when it comes to minimum wage jobs, a man cannot get paid more than a woman simply because of a gender difference. It goes on to further state that there has to be equal opportunity for both men and women. A man cannot get more chances or options in the work place simply because he is male. It expresses how a person must be qualified based on work place merit in order to receive a promotion or other workplace opportunities. When it comes to how it must be handled if a woman wants to bring up charges, there first has to be a witness. This can be either multiple women who have realized the same issue, or more than one person who can at least attest to the fact that there was mistreatment in how the two genders are being paid. It also expresses that there must be more than one incident to take it to court. If there is just one paycheck discrepancy, then it does not qualify; it must happen more than once and there has to be record kept of it. You can read the official document here for more information! 

While all of this sounds amazing and like it should keep everyone from paying women less, it does not. As we all know, laws don’t stop someone from breaking them. I’m guessing everyone who is reading this has gone over the speed limit, drank before they were 21, and maybe even done some small trespassing or other little things to break a law. So what is to stop an employer from paying a woman less just because some law said so? I dug deeper into the 75 cents for every dollar a man makes and according to Business Insider, a woman on average actually makes 80.5 cents to a mans dollar, and from there it goes lower for black women and Latina women. They also explain how it differs drastically from state to state. More conservative states tend to pay women less (not all however) and more liberal states tend to pay women equally to men, or at least closer to equal. Again not every liberal state is like this. The Business Insider chart for this information is below. Hispanic and Latina women have it the worse and make 35% less annually than a white man working the same job. However, the more corporate the job, the more men and women get paid equally, and the more blue collar the job, the less they are equal paid. 

Unfortunately, it is hard to track based on who is willing to come forward and talk to reporters and their employers about the pay gap. Most people do not have enough money to fight companies on it, and the age old lie that maternity leave is what causes women to have a pay gap in the first place. And in a New York Times article from 2017, I found that this is both true and untrue, once again depending on the field you are in. First, women tend to make a little less to begin with, so they often stay home when they have the baby because the man makes more so he would obviously keep working. Because they take time off, they are also often passed up for raises and promotions, even if they come back and prove themselves worthy. This article also depressingly explains how women with a college degree still will often only make 90% of a man with no degree. Since this article has come out, there has been a push for better paternity leave in hopes of two things: 1. Giving people more help at home after having a baby. 2. It will make the gender pay gap much smaller. 

At the end of the day, it is very hard to track who is making more and who is making less. Hollywood made it a very big and apparent issue, which it is, but it may be slightly different than what has been preached to us al over the media lately. So even though I may not have completely been able to say what is really going on, I hope this helps give you all a better idea of what is going on in the ever changing world of gender politics!

Madey