Is there such thing as an equal pay for women in the United States? We will explore the subject for equal pay for men and women.
The statistics show that full-time male employees earn around 20-25 percent more than female ones per year. So it looks like from the official information, women are being paid much less while basically doing the same work.
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The problem of an equal pay for women is not solely with wages. It is a complicated matter which includes receiving equal health insurance offers, establishing equal retirement plans and obtaining access to pay leave, among others. It is not that simple.
Younger professionals earn equally
In 2012 young female employees earned 93 cents for every dollar males earned back when they launched their careers.
What that statistic show is that at the beginning of their career path, male professionals and female professionals tend to earn similar wages. Why is this set-up fluctuates over the period of time, resulting in significantly fewer wages for women than for men? Why is there a gap and no equal pay for men vs women in America?
There are several more reasons for that and will look into them.
Are educational opportunities equal?
European and American women in our day and age have equal educational opportunities, unlike in the sixties, when the majority of graduates were men.
Let’s consider college career choices and the repercussions of it as far as future career is concerned.
Male careers are usually STEM ones, which stands for science, technology, electronics, and mathematics. That is, they choose majors which can lead them to become software engineers, industry analysts, accountants, astronomers, petroleum engineers, et al.
Women, on the other hand, tend to choose majors which will result in their positions as so-called “pink-collar” workers. Administrative assistants, dental hygienists, cosmetologists, social workers, massage therapists, et al. Equal pay for men and for women depends on the factor of their chosen path.
Dropping their careers
What is more, more than 50 percent of women who manage to start their career in science would later drop them sort of half-way through.
The polls by various independent research organizations have shown that women who had been engaged in the science field as full-time employees tend to abandon their careers due to so-called “macho” issues, even when we live in our seemingly tolerant age and seem to be far from the testosterone-abusive, dominance-and-submission, sexist Mad Men’s sixties.
Motherhood factor in equal pay for women
Unlike men’s, women’s job trajectories tend to be dependent on motherhood. Around the quarter of women would quit their job to ensure proper motherhood and take care of a baby. Needless to say, that on the highly competitive American market, interrupting the workflow for 1 to 3 years would result in the significant disruption as far as the career path is concerned.
Otherwise, why wouldn’t employers hire more women to adjust their working force cost optimization?
Is sexism an issue in American professional world?
While we live in the age when things like going on a date when you are younger and having to choose which family you want to belong to when you are older, seems to be equal for women and men in America, it is not that clear at the working space.
The thing is that women tend to take low-paid jobs as opposed to being paid less money for the same job as men.
If we take chief executive officers as an example and compare their wages in male and female counterparts, we will see that these earn more or less equal wages. However, there is only one female CEO opposite 8 male CEOs, if we are looking at the American companies at the top echelon.
Discrimination at the working place, which was an issue throughout American history up until the mid-sixties, may exist and may not exist. There is a little affirmative statistics on the matter.
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Watch our Negotiating factor in equal pay for American women
The problem of equal pay for women lies partly in the fact that most salaries and working benefits are a result of the mutual agreement between the hiring and the hired parties, essentially the result of diplomatic approach and the certain set of diplomatic rites an employee has to go through in order to gain benefits he or she deserves.
In general, female employees get fewer benefits such as promotions and gains because they tend to engage less in the negotiation process, which may be a core reason behind differences between men and women’s salaries.
Even when they do negotiate, either for their salaries or benefits, women are often subject to penalty for violation of existing social norms (that depends on a state and the specific field, of course, but the tendency is there).
It goes on fine as far as equal pay for men and women is concerned when the rules of the game are firmly and transparently established.
When it goes into a field where rules are uncertain and borders are elusive, women generally receive much less than men do.
One of the instruments the government and the local labor watchdogs could establish is absolute transparency and equality as far as “negotiating wages and benefits” are concerned.
What do you think about the matter of equal pay for women? Feel free to comment in the section below: