Gender Pay Gap In America

The gender pay gap has always been an extremely present and controversial issue within America, as well as other countries. The gap between salaries does not only apply to gender and women, the dissimilarities in pay are also noticeable between different races and ethnicities. Although there is a slight gap with every difference possible, the one between a woman’s pay and a man’s pay is the most extreme. Ever since women began working more and attempting to supply for their families the gap began to form, and it still remains today. Currently, the average salary for a woman is approximately 79 percent of a man’s income. During the Progressive Era, women earned roughly 60 perfect of what a man earned. Previously women did not hold the same types …show more content…
With equal opportunity in pursuing a career, equal pay between genders is expected, but it is not portrayed. Although many years have passed, and women’s roles and rights have drastically changed, the wage gap has only slightly improved over time.
The current president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, is working to decrease the gap and bring women and men to a more equal standing. On Friday January 29th, the president began to require all companies with over 100 employees to give reports of “what they pay employees by race, gender and ethnicity” to the federal government. This is just one part of President Obamas plan to create an equal pay for women. These reports will allow him to be notified of which companies are paying women less, …show more content…
The proposed solutions, as well as the attempts to change the inequality between genders, changed and so did the conditions that needed to be fixed. In the 1900’s women were just starting to truly work and hold jobs outside of the domestic careers that were typically held by females. This was a new thing and the government and business owners were not exactly sure on how to handle it, which is part of the reason women’s salaries were lower than men’s. A woman’s role in society was not to be a workingwoman, but instead to stay at home and care for her family and children. Men were expected to be the ones who held jobs, worked for and earned the money necessary to support a family, not the women. That is one of the main differences between societies views on gender today compared to in the early 1900’s. In present day America women and men hold the same careers, and often times both work together to support their families. Unlike the 1900’s, in the present day some fathers take on the role of ‘stay-at-home-mom’ and assume the role that was expected of women in the nineteenth century. The roles of how each gender is expected to act have drastically been altered over the years, but the 1900’s and present day still hold one thing in common: women are being payed less. Throughout the Progressive Era