One very polarizing topic that has been bought up multiple times during the campaigning for this election and almost every other across the United States is the gender wage gap. Im going to try to not pick a side on the topic but rather give my insight on how I think the topic is being misrepresented to the public which ends up hurting our society in the end. Im going to talk about the common claims that are made, the truth to those claims, what economics teaches us about the gap and what I really think causes the wage gap. I am not denying the gender wage gap does exist, just the extent of its existence and if it is even possible to address the situation.
To begin I want to talk about the statistic that is always being thrown around by everyone and their mother which is that, “Woman make 78 cents on the dollar compared to men” , which is not necessarily untrue, just a bit misleading. While it is true that if you take all the salaries in the US by gender and compared them, women would make around 78 cents on the dollar compared to men, but this is not the statistic that needs to be used in this situation. What really needs to be done is to take the salaries of women and men in the same field, same education background ,experience, ect and compare them, which ends up creating a more accurate image of incomes in the US which is that on average women make about 95 cents to the dollar that men do. A completely different statistic right? So why is it important to distinguish between the two statistics.
The first statistic puts massive blame on the hiring practices of various corporations in the US rather than addressing the real problem. It paints a picture of a sexist male boss paying women less discriminatorily, but that is simply not true. When we look at the adjusted average which comes out to around 5% it shows that the real problem is societal. The fact is that women tend to take jobs with more flexible hours and in fields that tend to make less money than the fields many men are going into. Which depending on the person, they could chalk that up to societal discrimination, but forcing women into a field just to lower the overall wage gap is just plain dumb. Public schools aren’t pushing women towards becoming a teacher rather than a computer scientist, so how or even why should the government intervene in a problem that only time can really solve?
So the reason I do say that a discriminatory wage gap does exist, is because it fits somewhere within the 5% of the adjusted value. But how small it is can’t be figured out because there are other reasons that have been brought forward for the reason that women make less in the same field. One of the biggest propositions is that women don’t negotiate salary as much as men do which leaves them making less. Overall men on average negotiate for a higher salary or better benefits much more often than women do. In my opinion I think this is definitely because overall I would say that women are less openly outspoken and confident in their ability and worth to a company. This may be primal or societal, but I think it just is how things are, for the same reason that on average men are more often sociopaths, which also leads to higher salary oddly enough. For whatever reason it is, people who are outspoken and take control of situations usually end up getting more managerial roles where the wage gap is almost nonexistent. So the woman who are outgoing and negotiate pay are making the same if not more than the men in their field.
So who should we blame or what should be done? In my opinion there isn’t much you really can do because it would be interfering directly into a woman’s life to force them into a higher paying field. Sure we can push science and math towards girls throughout their lives, but if it isn’t what they want to do then it isn’t going to happen. One problem I do see is I think many women go to college to get a fallback degree, but desire to become a housewife or the more flexible, less hours worker out of the two parents. This is definitely a societal overflow from the days where only the men provided, but especially in my area it is very common. It is still relatively taboo to be a stay at home dad, or to have your wife make more than you in much of the country.
Whatever the main problem might be, I don’t think there is much that the government should do. In my opinion, time will cause the ideology to change on this topic. As women continue to make strides to become more of an equal in relationships, the wage gap will almost disappear completely. There will always be some discrimination by the nature of humanity, but it will be so small, to the point it is irrelevant. If you have any questions or anything else you want to add, feel free and ill either respond or upvote you to acknowledge I read it!
-Calaber24p