Women and Gender Equality
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In spite of the gains made by the women's movement toward gender equality in American life, true equality has not been achieved in many areas, including the economic sphere. Surveys show that women on average earn significantly less than male workers, and indeed more than this, that women are paid significantly less than men for the same work. The overall figure usually given is that women earn sixty cents for every dollar paid to a male worker. One of the ways activists have tried to address this issue is to raise the solution of Comparable Worth whereby the nature of every job would be analyzed so that people doing the same job would be paid the same for their work regardless of gender. Legislation could be introduced, at the federal level, calling for the implementation of a national program of comparable worth . In both Senate and House committees the appropriate methodologies for deciding comparable worth calculations would have to be worked out. We should adopt federal legislation that would help to equalize the earnings of men and women so that people doing the same or comparable work would receive the same pay. Companies offer a number of rationales for this pay disparity, but these are based on false premisses and cannot justify continuation of the unequal treatment. The pay disparity that exists between men and women has a historical basis rather than a rational one. That is, women have only entered the workforce slowly throug
. . .
instead addresses situations where women who are already employed are paid less for jobs demonstrably similar to those of male co-workers. The issue of the education of women is also in part an access issue and does not address this central reality. In addition, there is clear evidence that the pay disparity for women cannot be fully explained with recourse to these three propositions and is indeed a matter of discrimination. In some companies, a man and woman might work side by side, doing the same job, working the same hours, and having the same degree of seniority, and the woman would be paid significantly less than the man. This indicates that there is a policy of paying women less for work known to be precisely the same, so jobs that are of comparable rather than identical are surely also part of a determined effort to pay women less because their work is seen as of less value. Such situations reveal gender bias leading to income inequality. Anti-discrimination laws would only attempt to solve part of such a dynamic.
Some businesses are certainly attempting only to get by with paying as little as possible to women. Males have agitated for higher pay for themselves and have a long history of receiving wage increases,
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Baumann Melnick, Senate House, , Conclusion Comparable, Comparable Worth, comparable worth, Review O'Neill, Winter Equal, Brown Baumann, brown baumann, PT Melnick, low-paying jobs, wage gap, labor force, baumann melnick, brown baumann melnick, pay disparity, Civil Rights, arguments wage gap, worth job, o'neill 1984, women entered, experience tenure current, women entered workforce, baumann melnick note,
Approximate Word count = 1620
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Women and Gender Equality
|