Michael Asch

Census Story

Despite America’s Progress, a Gender Wage Gap Remains

In 1995, Sarah Glasco, just out of college, got a job at Whole Foods. Two men with less

experience in the industry were also hired the same day as her. She later found out that they were

making more money than her per hour.

“I kind of lost my shit,” she said. She complained to her boss about her wage. In

response, she was given a small raise, but she was still making less than the men.

“I just kind of had to suck that up,” she said.

Glasco, now the women’s, gender, & sexualities minor coordinator at Elon University,

says this is one of millions of examples of women being negatively impacted by the gender wage

gap in America.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2018 the average man made $46,741 while the

average woman only made $32,654. Women only make 79 cents on the dollar compared to men.

It’s worse for women of color. Black women make 63 cents and Latino women make 54 cents

for every dollar a man makes. It seems like such a simple concept – equal pay for equal work.

But America is still struggling with this concept.

“This is an injustice,” says Liza Taylor, a political science professor at Elon University.

“You can’t pay people two different salaries simply because one is a man and one is a woman,

the same way you couldn’t do that for a white person and a person of color.”

Here’s how this still happens:

Wage Discrimination
 Taylor says that the greed of corporate America is partially to blame for women not

getting paid the same as men.

“If they can get away with paying anyone less,” she says, “they will do that”.

Companies try to save as much money as they can. This includes paying their employees

as little as they can get away with. More often than not, this burden falls on women.

Societal Factors

The gender wage gap is not as simple as bosses blatantly paying women an unfair and

unequal wage. Even today, America’s workforce punishes women for wanting to have families.

“If you choose to stay home and not work as much during the time you raise your kids,”

Glasco says, “there are so many things that happen: you’re not as marketable when you come

back, technology has gotten away from you because things are changing minute by minute,

you’ve lost social security, you’ve lost thousands of dollars in 401(k).”

But it isn’t just what women miss by not working. With no paid family leave or universal

childcare, many women are forced to bear an unfair financial burden for having children.

Taylor says that these societal factors, “trap women in a sort of weight group that might be

lower than men.”

The gender wage gap acts like a corrupt cycle. Taylor says that seven times out of ten the

husband makes more money than their wife. Because of this, some families decide it is cheaper

for the mom to take care of this kids instead of working and paying for a baby sitter. This

strengthens the perception that women should be the one to take care of the kids and locks them

into the gender role of a housewife. And the cycle continues.

There’s also an unfair double standard placed on American women.

 “In order to get what a lot of men get I have to complain, and then I come off as

complaining,” Glasco says. “Men who negotiate are considered strong and smart, but women

who negotiate are conceived as petty.”

Differences in Jobs

In America today, men disproportionally hold higher paying jobs than women. According

to Fortune, only 6.6% of Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO. Many of these higher

paying jobs are constantly demanding things that many women with families might not be able

to do, like working long hours and always being on-call.

“There are things that we have to fit in to our entire professional trajectory that men

don’t,” Taylor says. “That decision might also be governed by, ‘which path do I think will allow

me to balance my family and my other responsibilities?’”

Taylor says this is something men don’t consider when finding a job. “If it was really a

matter of ‘what do you love to do’, then I think we’d have a different breakdown of where

women end up working and where men end up working.”

Solutions

The gender wage gap in America is a complex issue that cannot be solved overnight, but

there are things that can be done to help. Both Taylor and Glasco recognize that things like

universal childcare and paid family leave would help close the gap. They say passing the Equal

Rights Amendment, which prohibits discrimination based on gender, would also help. But the

bottom line is American businesses need to find a better way to help their employees balance

their family and their work.

 “Why don’t companies have work life balance policies? I don’t know,” Taylor says. She

says she doesn’t get why companies refuse to believe that paying men and women the same

would benefit them.

“There has to be pressure on companies to pay women the same as men,” she says. “They

get away with it until they are called out.”

Taylor says people think about the wage gap too simplistically.

“We as a society like to believe we’ve left blatant discrimination behind us. ‘We don’t do

that anymore, we’ve gone through the sixties’… to those people I would say, first of all, that’s

wrong. But, I would say that’s only one small part of it. People don’t realize all these other

factors.”