The Gender Pay Gap

The is the idea of a gender pay gap that is being mentioned in the MSM (Mainstream Media), and other outlets such as progressive feminists. I believe that that's a myth because there are laws that were passed decades ago by the government to prevent any type of wage gap or any discrimination related to it.

In 1963, former United States president, John F. Kennedy passed The Equal Pay Act of 1963 that prohibits the wage gap that is non-existent in society today. I want to answer my question by doing research to answer my question if that the gender pay gap is just a false narrative or not even though I believe I'm right. In addition, the MSM is trying to propagate to the general population that is in fact just a made up lie for some narcissistic reasons or that there is an actual pay gap between genders.

In Essentials of Sociology by Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. Appelbaum, and Deborah Carr, it included facts and statistics that I strongly believe that will support my argument. For instance, in the textbook, there is a graph from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014 that illustrates that the women in the labor force in the United States from 1950 up until 2010 has dramatically increased (Giddens et al. 268). If there was a wage gap, then there should have been outrage from a long time ago around the early 2000s/ late 1990s because their employers would have been

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The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and other state and/or local laws that also prevent employers from paying people less on the basis of gender. If there are any instances of discrimination there are agencies to investigate those specific instances. For example, there are agencies that exist for people who will conduct an investigation into those claims to that person's employer. Those particular agencies that exist to prevent discrimination in terms of paying a female less than a man are what I believe that will make any arguments moot.

When I started to research to see if any real reason that such disparity does exist, there was an article from The New York Times titled Obama Moves to Expand Rules Aimed at Closing Gender Pay Gap by Julie Hirschfeld Davis. In the article, Davis articulated about the pay gap issue that the Obama administration is trying to pass measures that would get rid of that wage gap. In the article, the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision Jenny Yang stated that because there is a lack of proper data, it is difficult to detect any wage difference (Davis). This comes to me as a shock because I had believed that the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commision) would have detected the disparities in gender differences in pay but now since I have learned about this-this does change my view a bit that there is a gender pay gap.

In another of The New York Times article titled How Boston Is Trying to Close the Gender Pay Gap by Anna Louie Sussman. In this article, the city of Boston, Mass. has hostern workshops in order for other female workers how to negotiate their salaries.

Rahman 3 hosted workshops in order for other female workers how to negotiate their salaries. This is to prepare for the new law in the state that will take into effect in July of this year also known as the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act. This law according to the article the article will prevent any disciplinary action taken to an employee for talking about their pay with other coworkers(Sussman).

I think that this is very crucial because if there were no laws like this, then places like Massachusetts will for a long time have some sort of gender pay disparity in the United States until 2059 according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research (Sussman). In the textbook, it generates the historical disparity. For example, in the textbook Essentials of Sociology, it stated that sex segregation does play into the gap because of what kind of jobs the sexes have held, as it stated stating that jobs typically held by women, "on average, pay less than occupations dominated by man." (Giddens et al. 270). So there were actions being done by the government in order to curb this, and they have a good reason why that's the case.

At the end of this research, it turns out that my hypothesis has been proven wrong, reason being that there are other factors that I have not taken into consideration when I made my hypothesis such as the fact that there was a potential lack of appropriate data that is submitted to the proper channels to suggest there is a disparity when it comes to paying females in comparison to males. Or that it wasn't known in the past as it was now known in the present. Now I realize why that, in fact, it the gender pay gap is not a myth but a true reality that many women face, and why there is a need to rectify the situation.

References

1. Giddens, Anthony, et al. Essentials of Sociology. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. Print. Davis, Julie Hirschfeld.
2. "Obama Moves to Expand Rules Aimed at Closing Gender Pay Gap." The New York Times, The New York Times, 29 Jan. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/us/politics/obama-moves-to-expand-rules-aimed-at-closing-gender-pay-gap.html. Accessed 27 July 2018.
3. Sussman, Anna Louie. "How Boston Is Trying to Close the Gender Pay Gap." The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 May 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/business/gender-pay-gap-boston.html. Accessed 27 July 2018.

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