Post graduation, she will earn five percent less than he. Regardless of credentials, grade point average or experience, she will still make 95 cents to each of his dollars, according to Associate Women’s Studies Professor Dr. Kathryn Forbes.
This is what we feminist labor advocates call the gender wage gap.
It does not take a sociologist to tell you that most majors are dominated by one gender. However, it just might take one to explain how the choice of one’s major can have long-term effects on nationwide wages.
According to Beyond the Gap, a study published by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, men tend to go into more lucrative, higher-paying fields, such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences, whereas women tend to go into lower-paying fields, such as education, health and psychology.
Many occupations lack workplace flexibility and penalize women for being mothers. Thus the extended leave women must take from their careers to bear children ultimately impacts her hours, her income and further broadens the wage gap. According to Forbes, this is known as the mommy penalty.
Although there are a number of factors that contribute to the gender wage gap, occupational segregation is the leading cause.
Occupational segregation is when one gender or race dominates one position. For example, there are a total of 178 administrative assistants employed by Fresno State ”” 173 of them, are women.
This type of discrimination is what pulls woman into these dead-end service-sector jobs like waitressing, childcare and secretarial work. These pink-collared jobs where duties are endless and promotions are limited.
This is the pink ghetto ”” where the wages of a woman go to die.
And if you don’t know the women who run it by name, you’ve likely seen their handiwork.
They keep the mail coming and blackboard running. They make financial aid and university travel expenses possible. They are the underpaid and overworked women who do more than just sit behind the desks in each one of our departments.
Then, on April 22, 2010, as if they were not stretched thin enough, 75 staff members were issued lay off notices.
As any of the administrative assistants would tell you, it was the biggest employment downturn in recent Fresno State history. More than a dozen of them had to take on multiple roles amid a 10 percent pay cut and bi-monthly furloughs.
And still, despite a decrease in staff and an increase in workload, as well as wages going down and the cost index going up, administrative assistants continue to be under appreciated.
For some, it is indisputable gender discrimination. But for others, it is business as usual. So I ask you to take a minute and imagine what the campus would look like without these pink collared workers.
And never underestimate the power of the woman ”” a lesson Fresno State has had to learn time and time again.
Anonymous • Feb 23, 2011 at 11:27 pm
I just have to say what planet is all this coming from Mars. It is a fact that women are indeed underpaid so are a lot of other people no matter of gender. I think once the people that think this are likely college students or undergrads. They tend to build an opinion about anything because they have to Regurgitate what some professor has lectured on. The sad thing about people who have this kind of thinking is pretty sad. Just think in 50 years many of these undergrad college students who come up with this assumptions are gonna start doing some thinking on their own. In the end you going to come up with the face that there are two certainties in that life revolves around. The first would be just don’t do that come up with these types of facts especially during these time. The second is that you dropped $2,544.50 in fees on a pointless education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges and a free library card at the county library.
Matt • Feb 23, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Women get paid 5% less at work… but its commonplace for women to get free drinks at bars. Let’s call it even.
Anonymous • Feb 23, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Wow. Women are 60 per cent of college grads and are still managing to portray themselves as victims.
Did you know that women of you age ear MORE (not less) than men in a similar position? http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html
Or that women in the U.S. now control more than 60 per cent of the wealth?
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/print-edition/2010/11/19/Women-gain-wealth.html
Or that women are now the majority of managers and the majority of the workforce?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
Why are women doing so well relative to men? Could all their wealth be something to do with all that favorable treatment they receive in family courts at men’s expense? Or all the discrimination against men under the guise of affirmative action? Or feminists rejiggering the education system to suit female learning preferences?
Why are you not worried about the number of boys who are being underserved and/or ignored by an education system staffed primarily with female teachers (or do you believe boys are just stupid)? Or the fact that 10% of American boys are now being medicated by their primarily female teachers and single Moms? Or the fact that 4 times as many men commit suicide as women?
Oh, that’s right. These are not “women’s issues.” Thanks for nothing.
Anonymous • Feb 23, 2011 at 2:01 pm
No one told these female administrative assistants to apply for their job. Yet “job segregation” suggests they were forced into them at gun-point. If 173 of 178 administrative assistants were men, the argument would be discrimination against women. I don’t hear complaints about 99 out of 100 garbage collectors being men.
No legislation yet has closed the gender wage gap in the U.S. ”” not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action, not diversity, not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission….. Nor would the Paycheck Fairness Act have worked.
None of the legislation pushed by pay-equity advocates works because the advocates continue to overlook the effects of this female and male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. This may or may not reflect a higher percentage of women staying at home than in the previous decade. But if the percentage is higher, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs, and so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they’re supported by their husband.
If millions of wives can accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives can accept low wages, refuse overtime and promotions, take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/45ecy7p) ”” all of which lower women’s average pay. They can do this because they are supported by a husband who must earn more than if he’d remained single ”” which is how MEN help create the wage gap. (If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.)
See “A Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu
By the way, the next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone.