Wage Discrimination Against Women

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For decades, politicians, the media, and other so-called experts have been perpetuating the myth that women on average are paid twenty-three percent less than men for performing the same job. Even in a recent state of the union address, President Obama went as far to say that “Women make up about half our workforce. But they still make seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong.” (“Fact Checking State Address”) This figure is nothing short of misleading, and even if one was to ignore all of the credible information that exists contradicting this misleading figure, one must also consider that if it is true that companies on average only have to pay women seventy-seven percent of what they pay men for the same work, would …show more content…
Many believe that this is due to outright discrimination against women, but there is a significant amount of data that suggests that this is not the case, either. An article by Howard Wall, a Federal Reserve Bank economist, and Alyson Reed, the direction of the National Committee on Pay Equity discusses that when accounting specifically for the fact that women more commonly take time off of work to take care of children, that the pay gap shrinks considerably. This article also comes to the conclusion that outright wage discrimination is not necessarily the culprit, but perhaps more subtle gender discrimination, such as the general expectation for the women to take time off of work to take care of children, might be a factor in the difference between men and women’s wages. (Wall and Reed) Interestingly, another potential factor is that women on average might be satisfied with their pay at a lower amount than the average man. An article by the New York Times analyzes data from Payscale.com and discovers that on average, women surveyed reported being “Extremely satisfied” with their job, did so at the same salary where men on average responded that they “Hate their job.” (Rampell) Of course, this does not justify taking advantage of women and purposely paying them less, but women on average being happier while receiving lower salaries, could be responsible for at least part of the “unexplained” portion of the gender pay gap. Another important factor to consider in conjunction with higher job satisfaction at lower salaries is that women will often go into a lower paying fields such as education because they find gratification in those fields. A study recent study reports that a higher percentage of women than men find doing a job that helps society to be “extremely important” to them. (Pew Research Centers) Many of these jobs may give significantly
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