Women and Wage Discrimination

I disagree with the statement “There is no longer evidence that discrimination is widely practiced in the United States,” especially with regards to women and wage discrimination. The practice of paying men more than women for the same job, because men had to provide for their families, was once accepted in the world of business, but is now illegal due to the Equal Pay Act of 1963. However, even today women continue to earn substantially less money than men in comparable positions. The statistics suggest that women have made progress in closing the wage gap as of late, but those numbers can be somewhat misleading. Women, especially mothers, continue to be discriminated against in the workplace. According to the U.S. census data, in 1960, women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned. By 2002, this gap has lessened by 18 percent, as women made 77 cents for every dollar that men earned. While this is an improvement, the fight for pay parity is far from over, and this statistic shows that women are still being financially underappreciated in the workplace. The very next year in 2003, women earned just 76 cents for every dollar men earned, a setback from the previous year. While this isn’t an enormous drop the wage, the difference cannot all be explained away by factors such as experience, education, and time in the workforce, especially considering it is a year later, and with more woman joining the workforce every year you would think this would just give many of them another year of experience under their collective belts. Because of these ridiculous facts women earn less money than men throughout their entire lifetimes, thus leaving them with worse pension and retirement plans for when they decide to leave the workplace, despite the fact that on average women live longer than men, leaving them at an incredible disadvantage in the long run. I think it is fairly clear that wage discrimination is still a very common practice in the United States and cannot continue to be ignored. Until all women in our country are given equal pay for work of equal value, even if the work is different, the fight for decency and fairness marches on.

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