We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, “You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man. If you are the bread winner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you’re not. Especially in public. Otherwise you will emasculate him -Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (TED | We Should All Be Feminists). This quote describes one of the biggest problem women deal with. As women you can almost anything unless it degrades man from his power. What it means to degrade a man’s power can be described as belittling a man from what society sees as a manly position, having more money than men do, and making men …show more content…
By the time World War II came along more men were needed to fight in the war therefore women had to take over doing certain jobs that were supposed to just be jobs for men. In 1942 “the National War Labor board urged people employers to make adjustments which equalize wage or salary rates paid to females with the rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations” (Beth Rowen). This was ignored by employers and once the war was over the women no longer had jobs and men took their jobs back; while women went back to being housewives. In the 1950’s to 1960’s jobs were still separated and unequal. Job’s posted were categorized reading “Help Wanted--Male”. Women also only made .59 to .64 cents on every dollar that a male made for doing the same job (Beth Rowen). By June 10, 1963 John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act that was to end the sex discrimination against paying women lower pay for doing the same job as a man while he got paid more (Beth Rowen). With this new bill being passed it was expected that women and men were finally going to be paid and treated as equal. Unfortunately that was not the case; plenty of women still got discriminated against because of they’re …show more content…
In one instance, “the government indicated last week that it would avoid extending legislation to this right. If they want more money, it would seem, sisters are going to have to fight for it themselves”, meaning that us as women are on our own because the government wouldn’t help us (Kenny Ursula). But why should women have to fight for a law to be enforced? That’s technically not our job but the governments job. This is just another example of discrimination because the government knows that we as women aren’t going to be able to do this ourselves. But if we would report every incident to the EEOC maybe this would, not only, close the wage gap but also get better people employed in government to regulate the rules and regulations.
Sometimes the government does play its role and enforce the equal pay act. In 2014 the Royal Tire Company was charged with pay discrimination against a its woman HR director. Between January 2008 to July 2011 she was paid $19,000 less then the minimum salary for the HR position and $35,000 less than a male predecessor (EEOC.gov)