Why the gender wage gap doesn’t show discrimination in the workplace
The gender wage gap is traditionally defined as the difference between the median weekly earnings of full-time female and male workers. In 1999, women’s earnings were reported to be 76.5% of male earnings in the workforce. The problem with this statistic is that it often gets used as evidence for gender discrimination within the workforce as it implies that for doing the same level of work women get paid less than men. Yet what often gets ignored from this statistic are the other factors that result in the difference in wages between men and women.
The average woman works fewer hours than an average man in a week, thus, resulting in a significantly lower average wage per week. Additionally, among full-time employees, men work an average of 8.2 hours while women work an average of 7.8 hours per day according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statitics. Men also work an average of 42 minutes more per day than women in full-time jobs. Although this may seem like a seemingly small difference on a regular basis, this additional time adds up to 14 hours more work per month . This significantly skews the gender wage gap figure as it fails to take working time into account, leading to a flawed proof of discrimination in the workplace.
Women are also far less likely to ask for a pay raise when compared to men. According to the economics professor Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon University, women are 30% less likely to ask for a raise than men and are 12.5% less likely to negotiate their starting salaries. This results in a total of $1.5 million of lost income over the time span of a woman’s career. This is also linked to how women are less likely to understand their worth to a company while men often overestimate their abilities and skills resulting in their more frequent requests for a raise. Women are more likely to stay in the same pay range than men, further emphasizing the idea of the wage gap not taking this factor into account and not adequately portraying discrimination in the workplace.
Research has also shown that women voluntarily enter into lower paying fields than men. This is because women are more likely to enter into the fields of cosmetology, teaching, and childcare while men are more likely to enter more lucrative, high-paying fields, such as welding and car repair. This issue also extends to individuals receiving a college education. A report by Glassdoor stated that “many college majors that lead to high-paying roles in technology and engineering are male-dominated while majors that lead to lower-paying roles in social sciences and liberal arts tend to be female-dominated, placing men in higher-paying career pathways on average.” This, then, directly results in women earning less after graduating from college, further contributing to how the wage gap is not a result of gender discrimination.
When considering all of these components, the majority of the wage gap is not actually a result of gender discrimination within the workplace. According to a 1997 survey, all the factors mentioned account for 62% of the wage gap, leaving the remaining 38% of the gap unexplained. This means that the 38% cents is the only component of the wage gap that can be attributed to discrimination in the workplace. Additionally, 38% cents may be considered an insignificant amount but is actually a hefty sum when cumulated, and that difference in amount could drastically improve the economy. This one of the reasons why today’s society should be influenced to reduce discrimination in the workplace.
One way to eliminate discrimination in the workplace is through educating individuals on what is acceptable in the workplace and how gender-based differences, like the likelihood of pregnancy, are merely hypothetical situations that cannot be held against workers. Unfortunately, discrimination often goes beyond biases and is far more deeply rooted in societal and gender norms. One way to reduce the wage gap by targeting these stereotypes would be through informing students on majors that tend to lead to a higher pay in the future. However, the decision to go into higher paying majors may conflict with certain beliefs, in which specific fields are “solely reserved for men.”. Thus, the solution for solving the wage gap is much more difficult to achieve due to deeply-rooted societal norms that would take generations to alter.
References:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/women-are-still-not-asking-for-pay-rises-here-s-why/
https://webbcanyonchronicle.com/670/news/bringing-attention-to-the-gender-wage-gap-in-america/
