Gender Wage Gap
"Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation."- Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified long-standing inequities in American society, disturbing implications for gender equality in the labor market. The wage gap is a statistical indicator used as an index of women's earnings relative to men. Discrimination against women in the workplace and the gender wage gap inequities have been prevalent issues for decades. Significant concerns to consider are women's bias in the workplace, including childbearing, motherhood, childcare, family life, divorce, social norms, and expectations. Affordable childcare is crucial for working mothers and especially single mothers to remain in the workforce.
Women are now delaying motherhood due to careers, costs, and some women are not having children at all. Women are nearly three times as likely as men to be unemployed because of childcare demands.37 When women take time off for childbearing, mothers were nearly twice as likely as fathers to say taking time off hurt their job or career. According to a Pew poll of women who took leave from work in the two years following the birth or adoption of their child, 25% of women said this had a negative impact at work, compared with 13% of men.38
In the book Women, Work, and Politics, by Iverson and Rosenbluth, they discussed the enormous challenges women face to build strong coalitions and enact changes. The best-paying jobs are still very gender-segregated. There is also a cultural bias against women in politics, women have come a long way, but they have not arrived yet. Despite progress, inequality within the household, gender norms, and expectations continue to cause tensions for men and women in the labor market, exemplified by the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap typically refers to pay disparities between men and women doing the same work.39 Congress did not take significant action to address the gender wage gap until the Equal Pay Act in 1963, although the slogan "Equal Pay for Equal Work" dates to the 1860s. Large numbers of women were taking jobs during World War II, as many men were going off to join the war effort.
Until the early 1960s, newspapers published separate job listings for men and women. Newspapers listed jobs with the higher-level positions almost exclusively under "Help Wanted, Male." In the 1950s and 1960s, women earned approximately 60 cents of every dollar for their male counterparts in the same job. This inequity led to the passage of The Equal Pay Act of 1963. It was passed nearly 60 years ago and signed into law by President John F. Kennedy. When the Equal Pay Act was signed, the wage gap inched closer between men and women at a rate of about half a penny a year. This Act made it illegal to discriminate by sex in setting wages for the same jobs. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Nation's principal law on anti-discrimination in employment, "prohibits discrimination by employers, private and public, based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 forbade workplace discrimination based on the possibility of pregnancy with the same benefits received by workers with temporarily disabling conditions.
Title VII reflected the social changes of the post-World War II era, where the number of women entering the workforce changed how men and women interacted. The Equal Pay Act was gradually expanded between the 1960s and the 1970s, as two landmark cases strengthened and defined the inequities. Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co (1970) and Corning Glass Works v. Brennan (1974). In Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co., the Third Circuit Court ruled that those jobs need to be substantially equal but not identical. This case ruled that employers cannot change the job titles of women workers to pay them less than men. In Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an employer cannot justify paying women lower wages because that is what they traditionally received under the "going market rate."
The blatant discrimination apparent in these court cases seems outdated today, as does the practice of sex-segregated job listings. The wage gap has narrowed, but the wage gap is still significant. Since the 1970s, inequality has gone up, and many families are still at the poverty level. Even in 2021, in most cases, women are not paid equally. For example, women under 25 who work full-time earned 93.8% of men's salaries compared to those 55 to 64, who earned 75.2% of what men made.40 Women in low-paid jobs struggle to make ends meet, even if they can work full-time hours. Even when working full-time, women in low-paid jobs face a high risk of falling below or near the poverty line, and those odds are most significant for women of color. Women in low-paid jobs who work part-time because they cannot find full-time work or need to manage other obligations face an even higher risk of poverty and economic insecurity.41
Many women of color, even as the civil rights and women's movement opened new career opportunities, were employed in low-wage service sector jobs. To win crucial state protections such as inclusion in the minimum wage, Social Security, and unemployment insurance that helped many white male industrial workers win economic security and upward mobility in the postwar decades, people used publicity, protest, and lobbying. Still, these strategies did not allow women to flourish in the same way. Women had to fight to be included even after the Supreme court rulings. Women are the primary caregivers. As work opportunities changed since the 1960s and 1970s, new generations of caregivers, increasingly immigrants, continued to emphasize the value of their labor and their right to fair compensation and working conditions.
In her book, Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Moller Okin discussed how individuals and society-at-large must become much more aware of the trade-offs women made when their partners do not step up. One of her more radical proposals in this regard is that when one member of a married couple does not work outside the home, the working spouse's income should be split in half and paid equally to each partner. Even when women work outside of the house, they do four times as much childcare and two times as much housework as their husbands. Raising a family allows women less time to take on ambitious public roles, whether in politics or other fields.42
The Family and Medical Leave Act 1993 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act 2009 (signed into law by President Obama) provided more benefits to women. This Act allowed victims of pay discrimination to file a complaint with the government against their employer within 180 days of their last paycheck and to ensure that pay practices are non-discriminatory. The Lily Ledbetter Act, named after a former employee of Goodyear, alleged she got paid 15%-40% less than her male counterparts, which was true.
Women still spend 50 percent more time than men participating in activities to care for children in the home. Caring for family members, including aging parents, is disproportionately carried by women. After giving birth, women's pay lags similarly educated and experienced men and women without children. There is no corresponding "fatherhood penalty" for men. There are many explanations regarding the disparity of the vast wage gap for women's pay for decades now. Women from older generations that work in jobs are still subject to the attitudes and conditions of the past. In contrast, younger women coming of age in the 1990s reflect women's social and legal advances.
Women in Sports
“One cannot simply outperform inequality.”- Megan Rapinoe, a professional U.S. Soccer player.
Pay discrimination in sports is currently at the forefront of soccer. "In the 2019 Women's World Cup finals, when the final whistle blew, and the U.S. team stormed the field in celebration, thousands of fans chanted, "Equal pay! Equal Pay!" The U.S. Women's National Team, co-captained by Megan Rapinoe, has been a symbol of gender equality since they filed a lawsuit in March 2019 against the U.S. Soccer Federation alleging pay discrimination.
The women's soccer team members earn significantly less than their male counterparts even though their team has been more successful and profitable. (The women's team has won four World Cup tournaments; the men's team has never won.) Rapinoe says that the U.S. is due for a "paradigm shift" in understanding women's value and potential in pay equity. "Men are so often paid and compensated on the potential that they show, not necessarily what they have done," Rapinoe says. "And women are so often paid on what they have done which normally I would say. We outperform what our contract was."43
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