Gender Wage Gap Sociology

Gender Wage Gap Why is it that women are paid less then men when they are capable of doing the same jobs as men? In this day and age, you would think that women and men would both be paid equally but that is not the case. According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW) “in 2014 women were only making 79 percent of what men were paid” (aaum.org). This is a huge difference and pay and is not fair in any way to the women that work just as hard as their fellow male workers. There has always been a wage gap between men and women but in the past few years a lot of women have come out and voiced their opinions on the matter, leading it to become a hot topic. For example, just a few months ago actress Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay …show more content…
The first being that it is wrong that women are not making the same wage as men when they are working just as hard as the men, if not harder. Another thing that makes the gender wage gap sociologically significant is that its addressing an issue that about half of the population is affected by. It is not right that we have a gender wage gap and as sociologists we should want to doing something about it to fix it. By not doing anything we are saying that women are not equal to men, when they are perfectly capable of doing the same things that men are capable of …show more content…
The race that someone identifies as can have positive and negative results. For example, “between 1980 and 2002 the black-white wage gap among women tripled” and it did this “despite improving economic conditions in the 1990s” (Dozier). By having the wage gap between men and women get bigger among African Americans, we are just showing that we have a major prejudice against not only women, but also other races. When looking at Table 4 we can see that the women’s wage gap in just about every race, besides white and Asian American, are significantly lower. This is disconcerting because not only do these women have to deal with unequal treatment because of their gender, they are also having to deal with more discrimination based off their physical characteristics. Another thing from the chart that raises concern is that Hispanics have the lowest earning percentages. According to the AAUW it would take “Latinas almost an entire extra year of full-time, year-round work in order to be paid what the average white man took home by December 31.” This is troubling because people are already struggling to make enough money for food and rent off minimum wage, but to be making less than other coworkers because of their race is just wrong. Race is just a social construct that we came up with and it should not have any affect on how much someone is paid, because people of differ races can be just