Essay About Equal Pay Act And Wage Gap

Women and Wage Discrimination
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