Wage Gap

Since the beginning of the 20th century, women’s labor force has grown significantly. The number of women attending higher education and climbing the financial ladder has also drastically increased. Although the Equal Rights Amendment has long been passed, there have still been claims on an unjust wage difference as compared to men. Though it should be important to note the reasoning behind the differing “wage-gap”. It would be also important to cover what the cost would be to eliminate it. The main factors that make up the gap would be factors like career choices, personality trait differences, and personal development at the workplace.

Career choices would namely be the biggest difference in the reasoning of a wage gap. According to a survey shown by CareerBuilder, the results show that men aspire to reach higher positions in the workplace at a higher rate as compared to women. The reasoning behind this could potentially be due to societal traditions and pressure that men are supposed to have a higher-earning income. As the namely “patriarchal” role in a family, men are historically put into a role where they are supposed to provide their whole family with their income as the wives, usually did not work. Kim Parker noted that in the Pew Research Center article, “Women are more likely to adjust for lower-income careers to benefit and have more time with the family.” In the U.S workplace, it is safe to assume women represent nearly half of it. Those women technically spend more time than men on average to take of children and housework within a family. Pew Research Report in 2013 did a study that showed that on average, mothers spend up to 15 hours per week on housework as compared to the 8.6 fathers would spend. These hours add up to show the disparities between men and women with the number of hours worked.

Another factor would be that personality traits come in effect when measuring the success of a career long term. Studies have shown that unagreeable people tend to get promoted to leadership roles that usually pay higher.

By Eric Lin, Los Angeles, California

Ericlin827@gmail.com

+17145952886

Professor Russell Boyd at Golden West College