The Gender Wage Gap

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by Rebecca Ivener25 views·Updated Apr 21, 2022
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  1. The gender pay gap refers to the pay inequality found between
  2. men and women in the same field doing the same job.
  3. This pay gap is affected by many things, but there are three main causes.
  4. The first is discrimination and bias by the employer.
  5. Employer bias is simply a boss favoring male employees
  6. and setting their wages higher than their female counterparts.
  7. The second,
  8. and possibly most damaging cause of the pay gap is
  9. the inequality in pay for male versus female dominated occupations.
  10. Also known as occupational segregation.
  11. Female dominated jobs like teaching and nursing tend
  12. to receive much lower pay than male dominated jobs
  13. that require similar levels of experience and education.
  14. The last of the three main causes of the pay gap
  15. is the loss of pay women experience after having a child.
  16. Women have to take off around 10-12 weeks
  17. to care for their child and recover from pregnancy
  18. after having a baby,
  19. in which majority of the time they are not paid
  20. comparatively.
  21. Men only take off an average of one week after the birth of a child.
  22. This means mothers are getting between nine and
  23. 11 weeks worth of pay less than fathers.
  24. Mhm
  25. Mhm.
  26. There was a study done on over 20,000 workers on a crowdsourcing marketplace
  27. called Mechanical Turk, a site where people can list or apply for small jobs or tasks
  28. in this study only tasks in which the gender of
  29. the person completing the job was not known were used.
  30. It was found that women's hourly earnings were 10.5% less than men's.
  31. The pay gap within this group was estimated to be about 60 cents
  32. Meaning on average, the women were getting paid 60 cents less per hour than the men.
  33. The researchers then adjusted their model to account
  34. for the advertised pay of the tax.
  35. In other words,
  36. they wanted to see if the gap had anything to do with the tasks women were choosing.
  37. Once this was adjusted, the gap dropped to just 46 cents.
  38. This means 14 cents of the pay gap could
  39. be attributed to women selecting lower paying jobs.
  40. Researchers
  41. assumed that women picked these lower paying jobs
  42. because they value security and the lower paying tasks tended to be the safest.
  43. The remaining 46 cent gap was assumed to be due to skill level
  44. and completion speed. Since gender discrimination couldn't be a factor
  45. knowing the listers of the task were unaware
  46. of the gender of the people completing them.
  47. While online gender discrimination isn't a factor
  48. in person, it is and it
  49. severely impacts the pay gap.
  50. While both discrimination and the pay gap
  51. have seen positive changes in recent years,
  52. it is still slow moving.
  53. It was estimated in 2021 that women earned 82 cents
  54. to the male dollar
  55. Compared to 77 cents in 2011
  56. and 74 cents in 1996.
  57. Based on these estimations, women would have to work around 448 days
  58. just to earn what their male coworkers had earned in a year.
  59. These estimations also suggest that if the
  60. trajectory of the pay gap doesn't change,
  61. it will take until 2059
  62. for the pay gap to close for white women and even longer for Latina and Black Women.
  63. A survey completed by the Pew Research Center in 2017
  64. showed that one in four women said they had been paid less than a man doing the same job
  65. Compared to just 5% of men who said they had
  66. been paid less than a woman doing the same job.
  67. This graph just gives you a visual representation of the slow
  68. growth and progress women have been making in their pay.
  69. Now, as I mentioned before,
  70. the pay gap is not even among different races of women.
  71. So we're now going to take a look at how race plays into the pay gap.
  72. So as you might expect the pay gap, this is substantially larger for women of color
  73. than it is for white women.
  74. In order for black women to make what men did in 2020,
  75. they would have to work until around August three of 2021.
  76. In order for Latina women to achieve this,
  77. they would have to work until October 21.
  78. As the statistics suggest the pay gap is seen the worst with latino woman
  79. followed by black women.
  80. Then white women and lastly the smallest gap with asian women.
  81. This graph shows the average amount of money women lose to the
  82. pay gap over a 40 year career based on their race.
  83. On average during a 40 year career, Asian women lose only $120,000 to the pay gap.
  84. White Women Lose $555,920.
  85. Black women lose $976,800.
  86. Native american women lose a million, $80,000
  87. in Latina. Women lose a staggering
  88. million, 156,000 $440 on average.
  89. Another factor that plays into the pay gap is whether or not a woman has a child
  90. Caring for a child can affect a woman's pay in two ways.
  91. Number one is causing them to get passed up for promotions or important jobs
  92. and number two
  93. is that the loss of pay in the time they take off to care for their child.
  94. While you might think these aspects affect mothers and fathers equally.
  95. One study showed that women are twice as likely as
  96. men to say they left work for caregiving responsibilities.
  97. Even beyond that, when parents do take time off,
  98. women take off substantially longer than men,
  99. According to Pew Research Center, the average maternity leave is 11 weeks
  100. compared to the average one week long paternity leave.
  101. The other detriment of being a mother in the workforce
  102. is that women and Children tend to
  103. get overlooked for promotions or important assignments
  104. even more so than men with Children. Ultimately increasing the pay gap.
  105. These charts here at the bottom,
  106. just show the results of a survey done by Pew Research
  107. on mothers and fathers and how parenthood affected their career.
  108. As you can see,
  109. the women tend to be more impacted
  110. negatively than the men do.
  111. People tend to be aware of the existence of the pay gap, but not the severity of it.
  112. In a study done in 1990,
  113. American College students were asked to estimate
  114. the pay of both female and male workers
  115. in several occupations.
  116. This study was then repeated with different participants and occupations. In 2007
  117. and 2012,
  118. All three studies yielded the same results.
  119. All participants severely underestimated the size of the pay gap.
  120. This underestimation came from participants overestimating
  121. how much females were getting paid
  122. and rather than under estimating how much males were getting paid.
  123. And these are all my sites and sources for this project.