Do you believe businesses are so stupid that they will hire men when they could hire women at lower wages for the same work and have greater profit? If businesses are not stupid, how do you explain the wage gap?
The wage gap has to do with statistical averages of wages between the sexes.
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, for 2021 (the most recent year that numbers can be processed from income tax forms), median earnings for women in 2021 were 83.1 percent of the median for men.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U. S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Median earnings for women in 2021 were 83.1 percent of the median for men at www.bls.gov/.../...rcent-of-the-median-for-men.htm (visited January 15, 2023).
Since you are 14, you may not know what "median" means. In statistics, the median means 50% of people will be below the median and 50% of the people will be above it.
Let's try to put in some numbers to help explain this.
Suppose the median earnings for men was $50,000/year.
That means 50% of men earn less than $50,000/year and 50% of men earn more than $50,000/year.
But, for women, their median earnings are 83.1% of the men's median.
So, 83.1% of $50,000 = 0.831 * $50,000 = $41, 550.
That means 50% of women earn less than $41,550/year and 50% of women earn more than $41,550/year.
But, more importantly, significantly over half of women earn less than what half of men earn.
Something you may not be aware of is that wages aren't transparent. Many companies have nondisclosure agreements about salary. (This may soon become unlawful.) Companies want this because for 2 reasons:
1. If two employees do the same job but get paid differently, that will cause strife in the workplace.
2. By keeping pay private, companies can fuck employees over and they don't know any better.
It's that second part that partly explains the wage gap.
Since men have usually gotten more pay, they will expect more pay. Since women have usually gotten less pay but don't know what the men were getting, companies didn't need to pay more, so why should they.
But now, pay secrecy may go away and the statistics are part of the public record, so women are now aware that they've gotten fucked.
That said, PART of the problem is simply job choice. Many women often choose jobs that pay less than the jobs men do. Thus, statistically, there would be a earnings gap.
If you are working at mcdonalds your wages are fixed and non negotiable but for many or most professional positions your salary is negotiated.
I strongly suspect that SOME men are simply better at negotiating their wage than others and that the imbalance is not between men and women but between better wage negotiators who happen to be mostly men and worse who are mostly but not exclusively women.
Equal pay for equal work is correct but gender is nothing to do with it.
The problem of course then becomes how to you determine whether someone is producing an equal quantity and or quality of work to someone else? Currently the system is based on haggling and while that might sound archaic its actually not a bad way to determine value under certain conditions, i. e. when both parties are able to negotiate and where both have a reasonable understanding of their value and those conditions are NEVER going to apply fairly to everyone, some people on both either side of it won't be good at negotiating so there are employers out there overpaying for labour unfairly and unlike an employer and employee doesn't have a stack of job applications detailing exactly what their options are.
It is highly likely that this imbalance between employer and employee would need to be solved before it would be even remotely possible to have fair wages in the work place.
There is no "wage gap". The reasons for the discrepancy between the salaries of women and men on average, are due to a number of important factors, one of those factors being choice in career (ex. men gravitate towards fixing things, thus becoming engineers, women tend to gravitate to those careers that focus on people).
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8Opinion
Technically there's a wage gap even between men. On the same position some people have better pay, purely because they have the balls to ask for a raise where others don't.
Yes. But it’s because men are much more likely to be employers and thus give other men higher paying jobs. It’s really just a systemic issue of women not being in the workplace as long and it’s fixing itself really.
So it is a non-issue. But still real. It’s not fake.
The wage still exists in some job sectors. Corporate regimes are the prime examples of where it happens the most. Not only just wage gap of the sexes with but sustainable living wages for any given employee.
I think it's a myth.
no that’s illegal
Laughable.
Yea pay gaps exist
In the us def.
Yes, there is.
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