Women are being underpaid because they are women. This has been going in since they entered the work force in the 1920s. Presently, women make 70 cents for every dollar a man makes.
Although the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 (which took Congress 44 years to increase women’s salaries by just 59 cents), there is still much gender discrimination among women in the workforce.
Only nine days after Barack Obama was sworn into office, on January 29, 2009, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act gives permission to any employee to question why their paycheck is unjust.
Although many people think this act is reserved for women, it also can apply to men. By that, I mean men who feel they are getting paid less because of their nationality, religion, race, or gender has a right to question their salary.
Lilly Ledbetter is a rare case and once they passed the act on her behalf, Goodyear, the company who was not fairly paying her for her work, compensated her with the money they rightfully owed to her which was $300,000. Still, female employees are underpaid while working the same, if not more hours than our male counterparts.
Pay inequity can mean wage discrimination between minority men and White men, and minority women and White women.
In an article called “Disentangling Race-Gender Work Experiences: Second-Generation Caribbean Young Adults in New York City” by Nancy Lopez, there is a section that expresses the difficulties of second-generation West Indians obtaining 1990s, black men with college paid because they are or gender has a right to question degrees earn $798 for every $1,000 white men earn.
There is also an example of a woman who is Dominican, that was getting paid $23,000 a year while a newly hired White woman was getting paid $35,000. The Dominican woman brought it to her boss’s attention and she soon got her salary raised, but not as much as her newly hired co-worker.
The research also gave an example that “black women with four years of college, who work full time, on average, earn the equivalent of a white male high school dropout who works full time.”
To me, that is just upsetting because everyone should be treated and compensated fairly no matter what their ethnicity is.
On a more relatable note, the “Graduating to a Pay Gap” from the American Association of University Women published a report stating the results of the difference of salary between both men and women just one year after graduation. They assessed that “women working full-time earned $35,296 on average, while men working full time earned $42,918.”
To answer the question of the title of this article, women must come together and realize that this is OUR salary that patriarchal men are meddling with. Clearly legislatures do not know that giving women equal pay will allow her to make an additional $210,000 over her lifetime.
And by not fairly implementing the Equal Pay Act, women who have college degrees will lose $1.2 million while women who have professional degrees will lose a total of $2 million over the course of their lifetime.
ALthea King • Feb 5, 2014 at 8:11 am
Interesting article.