According to a release from the White House, for every dollar a man makes in America, a woman makes 77 cents. Throughout America’s history there have been multiple attempts to close this gender pay gap, and it’s about time people are paid not because of their gender, but because of their quality of work.
The first major push to shrink the pay gap was when President John F. Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The act stated that men and women must be paid equally for the same amount of work in the same establishment.
In 2007, equal pay took a step back when the Supreme Court ruled in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber case that there was only a small window of time where employees were able to file for a loss in pay wages. The ruling was overturned when President Barack Obama passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, giving employees a greater opportunity to file for paycheck discrimination.
Despite the passing of multiple acts, the gender pay gap is still a major problem that exists in the U.S., with women earning on average 23 percent less than men. In September of this year, Senate Republicans blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have prohibited employer retaliation when employees share salary information, making it more difficult for employers to create a defense as to why they are not paying their employees a certain amount.
The Republicans who blocked the bill claimed that the bill wasn’t necessary since the Ledbetter Act and Equal Pay Act already exist, but these acts did not fix the gender pay gap because pay discrimination is still a problem that exists in America.
There are several other reasons that could be to blame as to why women make less than men. One reason is that women are less likely to be involved in fields similar to computer science or engineering, and tend to instead work in social sciences fields that pay less. Although this will have a minor impact, it is not enough to account for a 22 percent difference in pay.
Female college graduates are one of the biggest groups affected by the gender pay gap. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) conducted a study titled Graduating to a Pay Gap: The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College and Graduation, which outlined how the pay gap negatively affects women who have recently graduated college.
The study found that women are less likely to become fully employed than men one year after college and also found that recent female graduates earned 7 percent less than recent male graduates.
The gender pay gap has existed in America for over 50 years and is not a self-fixing problem. If someone is putting in the same amount of work over the same amount of time, they should be paid the same salary, regardless of their gender.
When students graduate from Ohio University, they will be setting out with the same goal in mind: to get a job and earn a paycheck. The sad truth is that more than half of those graduates will statistically have a more difficult time becoming employed and earning fair wages.
The pay gap is a problem that still exists in America and it will take the companies and the government acknowledging the problem and working together in order to find a way to fix it.
Gabby McDaris is a freshman studying screenwriting. Email her at gm573913@ohio.edu.
