The gender wage gap will solve itself

Adam Griffin
  Staff writer

It has been widely reported that women receive approximately 78 cents for every dollar that a man earns in the workplace. This statement has some truth to it, but, in reality, its economic claims are baseless.

This oft-cited 78-cent statistic, for instance, is an accumulation of wages of all working Americans. It does not take into account the growth in women’s pay over the last 20 or 30 years. Also, it does not give any credence to future projections that indicate the disparity between men and women’s pay is, in fact, bound to shrink, if not reverse, within the next generation.

One interesting statistic that helps put the pay gap into greater context is that while men’s wages have only risen 6 percent since 1980, women’s wages have risen by roughly 60 percent, according to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation. So, despite the current gap in wages, it must be noted that it is rapidly shrinking.

Furthermore, the methodology behind wage gap statistics is highly misleading; this is mainly due to its use of all working men and women in its data collection.

Currently, there are still many families in the U.S. where women work part-time or take off time from work in order to raise their children — which, it must be said, is work of an unquantifiable value.

Another consideration is how this statistic applies to education and its impact on future generations. As a Yale University study in 2014 points out, more than 50 percent of people in higher education are women and nearly 60 percent of those pursuing an advanced degree are women. These realities are bound to lead to higher pay for women than men in the future because education is directly linked to higher wage earnings.

Yet, it is still vital to point out the various factors contributing to the wage gap in order to prevent mischaracterizations for political purposes. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the average amount of time women work is 35 hours while men work 45 hours. Of course, this collection of data skews the overall wage gap. The Bureau of Labor Statistics clarifies this contention by reporting that when equaling the hours worked by men and women, “women earn on average 90 cents for every dollar earned by men.”

Furthermore, the problem of unequal pay between men and women may appear to have strong validity on its surface, but upon examining the details of the issue, it becomes increasingly clear that the wage gap is not a problem of equality and does not require a governmental solution.

The idea that government needs to step in and mandate pay equality for women would likely entail a mandate that 22 cents — or whatever the figure may be in the future — be added to each dollar they earn is a silly concept and irreconcilable to the limited constitutional structure of our government.

The notion of government intervention in this area implies that women cannot rectify this problem themselves and that women are either unable to work hard enough or receive the proper educated in order to eventually equal or surpass men in wage earnings.

This is clearly a fallacy and future trends show that women may be on the road to equaling pay for themselves with men in a relatively short period of time. The disparity between men and women’s pay will shrink in the next generation as the higher number of women in undergraduate and graduate programs complete their educations and enter the workforce better prepared than their male counterparts.

By holding greater skills, women will continue to earn higher wages over time.

So, the disparity in pay between men and women is not an issue of equality but of historical barriers that are being overcome with time and increased opportunities. Fortunately, women are taking advantage of these opportunities in order to make themselves more competitive for higher wages in the workplace.

This is perhaps best showcased by a 2010 Time Magazine article, which reported that in “98 percent of America’s largest 150 cities…single women under 30 actually earned, on average, 8 percent more than their male counterparts.”

And it is becoming increasingly clear that discrimination among women in the workplace is diminishing. As June O’Neill, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office points out, discrimination is “unlikely to account for a differential of more than 5 percent” of the wage differential between men and women.

So, in order for our society to continue to narrow the wage gap between men and women, the current course of action is the best action. There will always be some level of discrimination against women, but as education levels rise and society’s appreciation of women deepens even further, this problem will inevitably correct itself.

Gender wage gap is a problem

Ailey O’Toole
   Staff Writer

There can be no more denying it: there is a disparity in average yearly income between men and women. A report by Expert Market stated that, on average, women make $10,291 less than men per year.

In North Carolina, the income gap between genders is $7,229 yearly, which is better than Louisiana, where the difference is $16,453. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women make 78 percent of what men make. The Huffington Post reported that a woman would have to work until April 14 to make the same amount of money in a year that a man would make working until the previous December 31.

In the U.S., women are paid 22 percent less than men on average. These statistics are even worse for women of color: the National Partnership for Women and Families reported that African American women make 49 cents to every dollar that a white, non-Hispanic man makes.

You can’t argue with these numbers; they have been well researched and reported by reputable sources. And it is time the government step up in order to do something about this unfair discrimination.

Even with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act expanding the statute of limitations for cases alleging gender-based discrimination in pay and the Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force addressing loopholes in existing legislation, the gender wage gap has remained statistically unchanged for the last five years.

One cause for the gender wage gap is that women tend to occupy jobs concentrated in low-wage industries or in undervalued sectors like healthcare and education. Women are more likely to be teachers than doctors because women are twice as likely to be discriminated against when applying for jobs, according to The Huffington Post.

Women have been typecast into certain jobs and that makes it hard for them to secure higher income jobs that may close the gender wage gap. A further problem on this subject is that many jobs in these fields were lost during the recession. If the government were to step in and create more positions in the education field, more women would be employed and the average yearly salary for women would increase, inevitably closing the wage gap.

Another problem contributing to this discontinuity is that America’s minimum wage is not a living wage; no one can support themselves off of the income from a minimum wage job even if they are working full time. This affects the wage gap issue because women tend to be clustered at the bottom of the income scale.

Women make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers, and over the past several years, they have taken up low-wage jobs at a faster pace than men. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, a salary that people could realistically live off of. This would make a significant contribution towards eliminating the gender wage gap.

But the biggest reason for the disparity in wages based on gender is that women are more likely than men to do unpaid care work such as taking care of children or the elderly. According to Oxfam, women around the world essentially donate anywhere from two to five hours of unpaid work per day, on average, to the global economy.

To close the wage gap, the government has to fix systemic problems like unionization, gender segregation and work-family policies. If policymakers were to start thinking of such unpaid work as being economically beneficial, it could boost gross domestic product by 9 percent in the U.S. alone, according to Oxfam, and thus increase the average yearly salary for women.

“Unpaid care work is what sustains families, what sustains communities and what sustains economies,” Shawna Wakefield, the head of gender policy at Oxfam, said. “It’s basically a subsidy for the economy that’s not recognized.”

If unpaid care work were thought about in this way, maybe policymakers would be encouraged to stop punishing women who do it, and maybe they would make it easier for women to do that kind of work and get paid well for it, too.

Another solution would be to get more workers into unions, organizations that are typically associated with lower levels of inequality. Union workers usually out-earn their non-unionized counterparts, but according to an analysis from the National Women’s Law Center, the benefit is about 1.4 times larger for women than it is for men. In fact, the wage disparity for unionized workers is about half of what it is for all other workers, and has continued to narrow over the past five years.

In 2012, the Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force announced an Equal Pay App Challenge that would allow people to “help in building innovative tools to educate the public about the pay gap and promote equal pay for women.” Salary.com helped with the challenge by releasing its collection of salary data about more than 4,000 jobs.

“Knowing what your job pays is an integral part of negotiating a fair wage,” general manager Abby Euler said.

Such initiatives will really help progress the movement to close the gender wage gap.