Gender Wage Gap Analysis

If a male and a female were to graduate from the same school with the same major and a take a full-time job in the same occupation, the female would be earning seven percent less than the male in the one year they were out of school. The question at hand is whether completely closing the wage gap between male and female workers, which ranges from a 37.5% to a 3.5% difference in a study of forty countries, benefit a country’s economy, specifically the GDP. A nation’s GDP is the gross domestic product, it is the total dollar value of goods and services that are produced during a specific time period. The GDP effects the state of a nation’s economy, meaning that if the gender wage gap increased the GDP, then a country could become more economically stable. Depending on the other factors influencing a country's economy, closing the gender wage gap completely could either increase the GDP and boost the country’s economy or have little to no effect. …show more content…
Laura Bassett wrote the article, “Closing the Gender Wage Gap Would Create ‘Huge’ Economic Stimulus, Economists Say,” for the Huffington Post from that perspective. Bassett references a McKinley study done in 2011 to support her argument when she said, “[it was found that] by increasing the workplace participation rate of women in each state from 76 percent, where it is now, to 84 percent, which is the rate of women’s participation in Sweden, the U.S. could add 5.1 million women to the workforce.” Bassett believes that this influx of women in the workforce will have “an economic impact of about $3 trillion in the U.S.” Subsequently, Bassett claims that a change of this size will stimulate the American economy twice as much as President Obama’s 2009 stimulus