More women than men are earning college degrees. With that, it appears we are near gender equality.
In reality, we are not even close.
Workplaces still discriminate against women due to wrongful assumptions ability and unwarranted stereotypes. These practices lead to a wage gap between genders.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey for 2012, the figure for median usual weekly income of women compared to men is 81 cents on the dollar, and this gap has been narrowing at a snail’s pace over the last few years.
Even women fresh out of college earn less in their first job than men who graduate with the same grades, majors and choice of occupation, according to ThinkProgress.
This should already be alarming to any woman about to graduate from college, but the pay gap continues to grow throughout a woman’s life, particularly if she decides to have children.
This is unacceptable with so many single mothers, and with 40 percent of the primary “breadwinners” being women in the U.S.
Even women at the “top of the ladder” face unequal circumstances and discrimination.
This year marked the highest number of female CEOs in America’s history, according to the 2012 Fortune 500 CEO list. This record-breaking number of female CEOs was a mere 3.6 percent.
President Obama has worked to ensure women earn equal pay for equal work, in order to help the growth of the middle class and our economy. One of the laws he signed was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows women to recover wages lost to discrimination by extending the time period they can file a claim.
Obama also attempted to pass is the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would ensure additional protections to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It would allow employees to learn what their co-workers earn; this transparency would make it harder for companies to give bigger pay raises to male employees while excluding others, without legitimate reasons.
Wednesday, April 9, ABC News reported that the Paycheck Fairness Act was blocked again (as it had been in 2010 and 2012) by a Republican filibuster in the U.S. Senate.
Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.), the GOP conference’s chair, said she felt the push for pay equality between men and women was “condescending.”
“Many ladies I know feel like they are being used as pawns, and find it condescending [that] Democrats are trying to use this issue as a political distraction from the failures of their economic policy,” said Jenkins in the ThinkProgress piece.
Whether Jenkins thinks the Democrats’ economic policies have failed should not influence her decision to not fight discrimination.
Another opponent of equal pay for working men and women is Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent member of the Republican party, who argues America’s pay gap isn’t large enough to warrant this kind of action.
“The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap,” she said in the ThinkProgress article.
She assumes women desire a male partner who makes more than them, and that by widening the pay gap even more, women will find a better life with a highly-paid spouse, even if they make an unfair, lesser amount.
This is an absolutely ridiculous and outdated argument.
Criticism has also arisen from conservatives who believe Obama’s actions are less honest than they look, and that he is just pandering to female voters for the November midterm election.
While the intentions of any elected officials should be questioned, I have no doubt that Obama is helping fight the oppression and discrimination women face in the workplace.
