Gender Roles and Specifics: Advocating for Equal Pay in the Job Market

My advocacy project is about gender equality in the job market. I find it fascinating that despite the Equal Pay Act, so much talk of how far we’ve come as a country in terms of racial and gender understanding, and with a woman being able to run for President without a shortage of supporters, there is still a huge pay gap in the job industry that women face for being just that…female.Some of the statistics were ones I already knew, just nothing I really thought deeply about until now. The details and facts I was able to pick up, from reliable websites, (mainly the American Federation of Labor), were absolutely shocking once they had enough time to process in my mind.
As a female undergraduate college student, I am working and striving to keep a high average, allowing my parents to help me pay tuition, and cutting back on both spending and free time so that I can buy books and in turn, study from them, all to earn a piece of paper that certifies that I majored in such and such at said university so that employers will know I have experience and knowledge and will hire me. Students of both genders in the same situation go through the same thing, give or take a few setbacks. We all pay roughly the same price, take the same required courses, and suffer through four or five years of being robotically programmed to follow what professors assign, tell us, or “suggest” we do. Then, of course, beside the aspect of grad school, we apply for jobs and pray that employers accept us or hire for a decent wage and hopefully some good benefits. Yet, somehow still…the female degree is worth a little bit less. It’s not because we didn’t work as hard, or because we’re not as smart as men are. The degree the university will give us has the same basic fundamentals behind it for everyone. However, when it is applied in the long run, the guy who sits next to us in the prerequisite for our major is going to be earning about $0.33 per dollar more than we will. If we are so privileged as to become lawyers, we’ll be earning more than someone working a more remedial, or lesser paying job, however we’ll be getting less than out male colleagues; about $373 dollars worth a week, to be exact. That’s only a 76.8% gap though: if we work at a restaurant waitressing as a summer job or as a way to pay the bills, we’ll only be making about $46 less per week, but the gap will be 87.1%. Even jobs traditionally seen as “women’s work” and that contain 90% of women in their force, still often pay men more. Female nurses earn about $119 less a week than men, who only make up about ten percent of that field. Basically, we earn less no matter what we do.
The pay gap is not just something that’s unfair to us either; it’s unfair to our male partners and family members as well. An employer afraid of appearing biased may pay women more, simply to avoid lawsuits. If a woman’s husband is injured or laid off, or the woman is a single parent, and the sole provider for her family,the family is at a huge loss due to her earnings, versus if the household were run by only a working male or a single male parent. Families with two salaries would earn more too, as the average woman working a full time job in the U.S. makes about $700,000 to $2 million less per year as opposed to her male counterparts. That’s enough money to pay for college, buy a house, and a car, of decent quality, nonetheless.
The figures I found were absolutely striking to think about in the year 2008, but it made me realize how blindsided we can often be by media perspectives and by personas put out from opposing views. Women have come a long way since the traditional days of working only in the home, but we still have a long way to go before we truly reach “equality”. Being able to work the jobs we do is a privilege in itself, but earning our fair share for them should be our true goal.