Happy Thursday and welcome back to my third and final installment of civic issue blogs on gender inequality! In my first two posts, I addressed two “taxes” of sorts that have been put on goods and services aimed towards women. The pink tax, referred to as any markup up on goods and services that are marketed as being for women, when men are paying less for similar services and products, is not a real tax, but simply an extra cost applied to many everyday items used and needed by women. The tampon tax on the other hand is an actual tax, imposing an additional charge on menstrual products and making them have a value-added tax or sales tax added to the initial cost, which stems from these necessary items being considered a “luxury”. Taking a bit of a 180 from the costs of items and going down to the root of the issue, this weeks blog is focused on the gender wage gap itself, and the way that it is still a prominent issue, putting a further emphasis on the connection to discriminatory gender based taxing.

As of March 14th, 2023, also known as equal pay day, the U.S Department of Labor has determined that women in the U.S who work full-time, year-round, are paid an average of 83.7 percent as much as men, which amounts to a difference of $10,000 per year. These gaps are even larger for many women of color and women with disabilities, and are the equivalent to it taking females approximately 15 months to make the same amount of money that a male does in 12 months. While this is a gap that affects women as an entire gender, it is also important to highlight the fact that there are significant differences within the gap based on race and ethnicity, with gender gap being most significant and easily identifiable in the lives of women of color. When comparing the 2018 median earnings of full-time, year-round workers by race/ethnicity and sex, it was found that Hispanic or Latino women have the largest pay gap, making a whopping $0.54 for every $1.00 that a white man makes. Following closely behind is American Indian and Alaska Native women, making $0.57 per mans dollar, Black women at $0.62, White women at $0.79, and finally Asian women, making $.90 for every dollar a white man makes. This $0.36 difference within the female gap itself exemplifies the way that while gender is the main and overall broadest category of discrimination when it comes to pay, it comes down to so much more than that, with factors adding upon each other to create an environment so far from fair. The larger wage gaps for most women of color reflect the compounding negative effects of gender bias as well as racial and/or ethnic bias on their earnings.

While these wage gap calculations reflect the ratio of earnings for women and men across all industries, they do not reflect a direct comparison of women and men doing identical work. Through calculating it in this manner, experts have been able to capture the multitude of factors that are driving the gender wage gap, and have been for so many years. One of these is a difference in years of experience.  For years, women have been disproportionately driven out of the workforce to accommodate caregiving and other unpaid obligations and thus tend to have less work experience than men. While the societal view that women “belong in the kitchen” has thankfully shifted as years pass, and the sexist idea is not necessarily the norm anymore, there is still a firm belief held by many that women should not work for long, and instead should raise children and be homemakers.  Access to paid family and medical leave makes women more likely to return to work—and more likely to return sooner. However, as of March 2019, only 19 percent of civilian workers had access to paid family leave through their employers and only 40 percent had access to short-term disability insurance benefits to deal with their own medical needs. This factor, while stemming from overall inexperience and not necessarily direct discrimination, is a result of a sexist societal view that has yet to fully shift, leaving many women unfairly compensated even when they’re not choosing to take on the common role of motherhood or homemaking.

Another factor driving the gender wage gaps is a difference in hours worked between men and women. This piggybacks off of the reasoning behind the difference in years of experience, as women tend to work fewer hours to accommodate caregiving and other unpaid obligations, and as a result are also more likely to work part time, which means lower hourly wages and fewer benefits compared with full-time workers. Once again, this factor avoids the black and white general discrimination of simply being female and therefore being paid less, and instead places the blame on our society as a whole, and the way that women have always been viewed and categorized as putting other aspects of life before the workforce, even when it’s untrue for so many. The most widely known and easily explainable driving factor of the gender wage gap is general discrimination. Gender-based pay discrimination has been illegal since 1963, but it is still a frequent, widespread practice, particularly seen in the lives of women of color. It can thrive especially in workplaces that discourage open discussion of wages and where employees fear retaliation. Beyond making the explicit decision to pay women less than men, employers may discriminate in pay when they rely on prior salary history in hiring and compensation decisions. This can enable pay decisions that could have been influenced by discrimination to follow women from job to job, creating an endless cycle of underpaid work simply due to ones gender.

While the gender pay gap has unfortunately not changed much in the last two decades, it has narrowed considerably when looking at the longer term, both among all workers ages 16 and older and among those ages 25 to 34. The estimated 18-cent gender pay gap among all workers in 2022 was down from 35 cents in 1982. And the 8-cent gap among workers ages 25 to 34 in 2022 was down from a 26-cent gap four decades earlier. Women’s and men’s earnings may shift slightly each year with each new batch of Census Bureau data, but the gender wage gap will not close anytime soon without action. Efforts to close the wage gap must address more than simple discrimination, but the driving factors so deeply rooted in our countries discriminatory history.  The gender wage gap is an issue of not just economic security, but equality as well, and women and their families cannot afford to wait for either.

Text Citations:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/03/01/gender-pay-gap-facts/

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/quick-facts-gender-wage-gap/

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osec/osec20230314#:~:text=In%20the%20U.S.%2C%20women%20who,color%20and%20women%20with%20disabilities.

Image Citations:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/parsing-the-gender-pay-gap-1542917969

https://www.inquirer.com/news/inq2/gender-pay-gap-philadelphia-men-women-wages-20220915.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/the-wage-gap-gets-worse-when-women-hit-their-30s-heres-why.html