History has it that discrimination takes many forms, but the most common forms of discrimination border on race, religion, moral beliefs, physical appearance and, more importantly, gender. At the workplace, human beings are still battling gender inequality as seen through the kinds of job men and women do regardless of their educational background and the salaries they take home. In the United States, women are almost half of the workforce, half of that serves as the major breadwinners of their families. Further, many hold college and graduate degrees more than men do yet continue to earn far much less than men do. The statistics that have been analyzed indicate that women who possess the same education and work experience earn far much less than their male counterparts. What is worse is the fact that this problem is further affected by issues such as race. The wage gap between men and women in the United States might not close anytime soon because society has been cultured to hold men as superior to women.
According to The American Association of University Women, despite having gone to the same colleges, picked the same majors, graduated with the same grades and possessing the same work experience, for every dollar a man earns a woman will earn 82 cents (Moghadam, 1999). The situation is as it is because history has made men be the superior gender to women and that affects how even employers view both genders. Men have always gone out to work from time immemorial while women stayed at home to take care of the family. Men were supposed to take care of women, and because their place is in the home, women have always been assumed to be inefficient as compared to men. Society has been socialized to hold these beliefs even in this day and age when women have proven to be as competent. As long as women are seen to be inferior and inefficient, their wages will be less than those of men.
The past influences the present and also future, and decisions made in the past have a way of influencing decisions made now and those that will be made in the future. The modern day woman has opportunities that were not available for the women of the past. Even after they were accommodated in the workforce, the entry salaries for women were far much lesser than those of men. Several decades later, some of those decisions have influenced the way women are handled at their entry level in the workforce. That in return affects their growth in their careers as well as their long term earnings (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). The influence of gender on the entry salaries for women and women has existed even in the present day, and as long as this notion persist, the wage gap will keep on widening and men will remain the favored gender.
One wonders why employers are still holding on to discriminatory acts even in the 21st century, when equality and equity are thought to have been achieved in many spheres of life. But sometimes women are to blame because they always pick low paying jobs, even when they have the right qualifications (Lips, 2013). Further research shows that there is a high likelihood that men will turn down job offers that pay way less than they expect while women will just take them because many of these women are more interested in working and earning whatever amount of money offered to them. The sad thing is that employers have taken advantage of this shortcoming on the part of women to pay them less than men. Unfortunately for them, these trends have been ongoing for a long time, and it seems as though they will never change in the foreseeable future.
There are so many factors that influence the decision to pay women lower salaries as compared to men. The problem of racial inequality plays a major role because it is a defining tag that separates different races on the lines of superiority and inferiority. For instance, women of color and other minority groups will be paid much lesser than their white counterparts (Lips 2013). Further, the differences that make a certain group of women superior and others inferior jeopardize their negotiation power because a section of them will be favored over others (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). As long as there is a group that will be regarded as superior to another; as long as there are people who will take up opportunities that will favor them over others the wage gap will persist. And as long as more men occupy high-paying or cadre jobs, the wage gap will persist. Women have also settled for less, and employers will keep taking advantage of that fact.
It is imperative to note that the wage gap between men and women will continue to persist for as long as society depicts one gender as better than the other. Segregation of jobs by use of gender and other factors such as race provides a picture of how segregation exists in the United States. Further, issues such as occupational segregation favor men as compared to women. It is not easy to find women track drivers because such jobs are thought to suit men. There are jobs that men can comfortably do and women cannot. As long as such discrepancies exist the gender wage gap will never be closed. Besides, men tend to work longer hours than women because women are expected to manage the home and take care of their children while working at the same time.
References
DiPrete, T. A. & Buchmann, C. (2013). The Rise of Women: Growing of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it means for American Schools. New York: Russell, Sage Foundation.
Lips, H. M. (2013). The Gender Pay Gap: Challenging the rationalizations. Perceived Equity, Discrimination, and the Limits of Human Capital Models. Springer. Web. Retrieved on 25th March 2016 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-012-0165-z
Moghadam, V. (1999). Gender and Globalization: Female Labor and Women’s Mobilization. Journal of World Systems Research. Vol. 5, Issue 2.
