The Wage Gap
Whether or not the wage gap exists depends entirely upon who one asks. If one is asking Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and writer for Time, she will say, no, it does not exist: “The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time.” The enduring myth that “women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work” is based on the average earnings statistic—not on an actual analysis of a side by side comparison of pay for men and women doing the same work (Sommers). But if you ask Nikki Graf, Anna Brown and Eileen Patten, writing for Pew Research, you will research a much different answer. They argue that the pay gap is closing but that women are still behind by as much as 15 cents on the dollar. However, if one pays attention to the data that Graf et al. are using, one can see that Hoff Sommers has a point. These studies are not of side by side comparisons of wages for men and women doing the same work. They are rather statistics of median earnings—and all they really show is that men make more money than women: they do not actually show how that is happening, i.e., whether men are working more hours, working different jobs, or receiving higher pay because they have higher positions in companies. Both sides of the argument are correct, nonetheless: there is a wage gap—or rather...
The only difference is in how the sides interpret the statistics.
If one is going to accept the argument of Hoff Sommers, there really is not anything that needs to be done about it. If women want to make more than their male colleagues all they have to do is put in the kind of hours at the kind of level where they will earn a higher salary. It is not a question of inequality in...…aside for men is actually an extremely sexist thing to say. Women have children because they want them. They don’t go after that higher paying job with the more intense hours and responsibilities because they choose not to—they do not want it. They pick different education pathways in school because those are the pathways that appeal to them (Sommers).
In conclusion, the debate is all about how men make more than women. The wage activists say it is because of illegal discrimination against women by virtually every HR department in the country (they don’t say this explicitly but implicitly this can be the only way such a conspiracy against women could actually happen). The realists point out that the wage gap is really just an earnings gap—men make more than women because they have different jobs with different demands and typically longer hours. It is not a conspiracy against women—it is simply a reflection of the different choices and pathways that men and women take in their education, careers and lives.
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