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Equal Work for Equal Pay 2018

How To Bridge the Gap

By Iria Vasquez-PaezPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Women earn 80 cents for every man’s $1.00. This is still true in 2018. We are 200 years away from pay equality here. When women start complaining more about the pay gap is when we find that it can equalize. This is constant discrimination that women face daily in the workplace. When I started working, I became very aware of this discriminatory process. Pay disparity is everywhere around us, dependent on what career a person is working in. Women like E! News host Cat Sadler are becoming more aware of this gap every day because she left the network due to a pay gap she noticed between herself and her male co-host.

The Institute of Women’s Policy Research reports that 51 percent of women surveyed feel that discussions of wage and salary are discouraged or outright prohibited. Pay secrecy is thus said to lead to more discriminatory practices since nobody is outright confronting it. Some companies are not transparent about every employee’s salary unlike Whole Foods and Buffer. Within my companies, I plan on providing equal work for equal pay without discriminatory practices. Women are expected to reach pay equity with men by 2059. This is too long of a wait for me.

The pay gap was smallest in a state like New York but largest in a state like Louisiana. This means that a state’s social culture plays a role in how women get paid for equal work. In 2016, Hispanics, African Americans, American Indian, Alaska Native, and Pacific Islanders had lower earnings than non-Hispanic white or Asian women. So if you are a person of color, you are not paid as equally as a white woman is but even she has a pay gap when it comes to her compatriots, white males.

Earnings for workers tend to increase with age, albeit slowly after 45 and decrease at 55. In 2016, women ages 20-24 were paid 96 percent of men and 78-89 percent from age 25 to 54. By the age of 55-64, female workers are paid only 74 percent of what men are paid. More education can mean increased earnings, presumably for both males and females. Women are not paid as their male counterparts, needless to say that women of color aren’t paid as much as their white female counterparts who exercise their white privilege when they get paid more. The gender pay gap is not as bad as the racial pay gap.

Women who complete college are less able to pay off their student loans, which means they take longer to catch up than men. College graduates working full time owe debt if they have debt at all. I don’t because I had a Pell Grant through two years or four semesters. But many other people my age are paying off student loans. Despite women being in the workforce in the present and in greater numbers than in the past, we are still not paid equally regardless.

We are trying to figure out solutions to this problem. Some CEOs need to talk in the open about paying women fairly, regardless of race, since there is a race gap too. And also, if you have a disability, you get paid less than the average person without a disability because of the sub-minimum wage that disabled people are paid. What is to be done about this problem? Women can learn how to negotiate for better pay as we try to bridge the gap. Congress needs to take more action in the equal pay war since the gap becomes wider if you are a minority.

Works Cited:

  • https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/
  • http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/22/pf/words-gender-pay-gap/index.html
  • https://now.org/resource/women-deserve-equal-pay-factsheet/
feminism
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About the Creator

Iria Vasquez-Paez

I have a B.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State. Can people please donate? I'm very low-income. I need to start an escape the Ferengi plan.

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