The Gender Wage Gap is Alive and Well

 

The Gender Wage Gap is alive and well

A recent PayScale study has revealed shocking numbers pertaining to the gender wage gap.

In the study PayScale calculated the average lost earnings in a 40-year career, it was found that throughout a women’s career making 3 percent annually she will make $850,000 less than a man in her life.

when doing the same calculation for a controlled group of men and women considering job title and qualifications. It was found that women still make $770,000 less than a man for doing the exact same thing.

To make the same amount as a man a woman would need to work an additional 2 years minimum. That is enough money to live comfortable in retirement for over 15 years. Making so much less may be hard on a mother trying to support their family or a niece trying to make a living getting out of college.

 Women in college and women trying to make a living without a full-time job even struggle to make the same pay with a gig job. On of the biggest gig jobs right now is uber. An article done by Yahoo finance partnering with the Fortune states, “Female Uber drivers make 7% less per hour than their male counterparts--even though the algorithms that determine pay for the ride-hailing service are gender blind, according to a multi-year study.”

With covid times recently past we are still recovering from the year of quarantine. One of the best ways people have been doing that is through jobs like Uber that have flexible hours and where you are your own boss. But still there is bias how does this happen?

Yahoo finance reference about a study where some economists tried to figure out the answer. They found “77% of women quit the Uber platform after 6 months compared to 65% of male drivers.” Along with “the gap in earnings is explained by differences in where people choose to drive, with men, on average, driving in locations with higher surge and lower wait times.”

While these are valid points, this does not explain everything. During the multi-year study there has been no progress in shrinking the pay gap. This does not make sense because after the 6 starting months the remaining women would learn good routes to work on. Which would increase the income of the drivers. There may be more men driving but that does not affect what each driver would make per customer.

Not only are college women struggling to get equal pay from uber but also from some of the most basic college jobs, Like waitressing and bartending. These are very good jobs in collage since you can make a good amount of money and can work around schedules. But these jobs are the two highest ranked on the chart for top 20 jobs with the worst gender gap. How are the women of the younger generations supposed to make a living if they are making $0.78 cents to every dollar a man makes according to PayScale.

The gender pay gap does not only just affect the lower class it also has a place in the higher-class jobs with jobs like surgeons and directors also reaching the top 20 highest gender pay gap list.

While I understand some jobs like the two just mentioned are male dominated jobs, so it does not surprise many to be seeing them on the top 20 list. what is a shock to many people even in female dominated jobs like nursing, teaching, and fashion design gender pay gap is still alive and well? Even in the female dominated jobs women can still make 10-22% less than what a man would make in the same job.

how can we trust the company to be honest about having equal pay when they make an atmosphere where it is frowned upon to talk about your income?

A study by Bloomberg BusinessWeek might suggest that maybe we cannot trust the businesses with this important task. The data suggests that women in Microsoft can make as much as 8.6% less than a man does in the company. Considering for title and training it drops the pay gap to 2.8%. A large drop when we are talking about money.

But that’s not what Microsoft has been telling their shareholders, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek Microsoft has been informing their shareholders their gap is only .2%. the numbers Microsoft reports is 2.6% lower than the actual pay gap.

Microsoft can get away with this because in the USA right now there are no laws for businesses to give analysis on salary data. While there are no laws, businesses can steal money away from the hard-working people and you would never even know. With no laws forcing businesses to tell the truth they can show you whatever they want too. We need to teach our daughters and nieces that its ok to talk about pay.

If we teach the younger generations that its ok to talk about what you make, we can avoid the future gender bias and save our kids from this cruel bias.