Moreover, it is important to discuss the motherhood penalty that comes into play with the gender pay gap. Women’s earnings typically drop by the time they turn 30. By then, this effects their lifetime earnings and retirement security. Therefore, the pay gap not only hurts women’s lives, but its hurts their families and the economy as well. The less money a mother can bring home, the less money she has to feed and take care of her family. Ridgeway explains how working mothers suffer penalty in their wages of about 5% per child (116). This is because full-time working mothers take on a disproportionate share of child rearing tasks more than the fathers do. In 2015, Pew Research Center found that in two-parent households, with both parents working
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The pay gap proves to be far worse for women of color. African-American women earn 64 cents while Hispanic women earn 56 cents for every dollar a white man earns. Despite women’s high levels of education, the U.S. has one of the largest percentages of gender inequality in the industrialized world. “At every level of schooling, women and black men have lower earnings than white men” (Treiman and Hartmann 13). This goes to show that education levels are not the most effective pay gap solution because the glass ceiling continues to discourage those who try. The glass ceiling is a non-visible barrier that keeps minorities and women from reaching the upper rings of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements. As a result, men are given greater life chances while women end up getting shortchanged. In Donald Treiman and Heidi Hartmann’s book titled Women, Work and Wages: Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value, the validity of the compensation systems and the methods for determining the relative comparable worth of jobs is investigated upon. In conclusion, they discovered that job evaluations are inherently subjective and prone to sex stereotyping. As a result, jobs held mainly by women become undervalued, resulting in lower pay. For example, “the secretaries that firms hire are primarily women because most trained secretaries are women” and typically men dominate managerial jobs because they are trained to be in these positions (Treiman and Hartmann 41). Due to the flawed Equal Pay Act, women are discouraged from filing complaints about their unequal compensation because wage discrimination is difficult to prove to the courts. These jobs that require “similar levels of skill, effort, and responsibility and similar working conditions” underpaid women who were nurses, librarians, government employees and clerical workers (Treiman and Hartmann 1). The women who did file
The pay gap proves to be far worse for women of color. African-American women earn 64 cents while Hispanic women earn 56 cents for every dollar a white man earns. Despite women’s high levels of education, the U.S. has one of the largest percentages of gender inequality in the industrialized world. “At every level of schooling, women and black men have lower earnings than white men” (Treiman and Hartmann 13). This goes to show that education levels are not the most effective pay gap solution because the glass ceiling continues to discourage those who try. The glass ceiling is a non-visible barrier that keeps minorities and women from reaching the upper rings of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements. As a result, men are given greater life chances while women end up getting shortchanged. In Donald Treiman and Heidi Hartmann’s book titled Women, Work and Wages: Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value, the validity of the compensation systems and the methods for determining the relative comparable worth of jobs is investigated upon. In conclusion, they discovered that job evaluations are inherently subjective and prone to sex stereotyping. As a result, jobs held mainly by women become undervalued, resulting in lower pay. For example, “the secretaries that firms hire are primarily women because most trained secretaries are women” and typically men dominate managerial jobs because they are trained to be in these positions (Treiman and Hartmann 41). Due to the flawed Equal Pay Act, women are discouraged from filing complaints about their unequal compensation because wage discrimination is difficult to prove to the courts. These jobs that require “similar levels of skill, effort, and responsibility and similar working conditions” underpaid women who were nurses, librarians, government employees and clerical workers (Treiman and Hartmann 1). The women who did file