Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Does Race of Gender Matter More to Your Paycheck?

This article brought to light many issues that face the workplace today. It primarily focused on the wage gap between men and women, but also between races. Through multiple studies, it backed up the claim that the work place benefits white men only. Overall, women make .86 cents for every dollar a man makes. It's a statistic I've heard time and time again. However, what I did not realize is this is just an average between races. Asian and American women make roughly the same amount. Black women make less than that by nine cents. Hispanic women, horrifyingly, only make .55 cents for every dollar a white male makes. What I found interesting was that this isn't only with salary jobs, hourly wage jobs also saw a large wage gap based on gender and race.

The article got more frustrating as I continued to read it. The wage gap widens with education levels. A white man with a PhD will make significantly more than a white women, Asian women, black women or Hispanic women with the same education. Looking at it through this angle, education has a lot higher value for white men than it does for anyone else. Clearly there needs to be a workplace wage reform. It isn't fair for men and women to make different amounts of money for the same positions. Especially for minority women! I feel terrible that they have to work so much more just to earn what a white man does. It's a way of asserting dominance over all these women and frankly, it's disgusting.

Ashton, Deborah. (2014, June 10). Does Race or Gender Matter More to Your Paycheck? Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/06/does-race-or-gender-matter-more-to-your-paycheck.

3 comments:

  1. This is a topic that I discussed in my Human Rights class in high school, and the wage gap relates to other areas including job security and whether or not these jobs or high risk or not. As a result, it translates and partially contributes to the wage gap. It is not to deny its existence on the basis of gender; however, education and wealth are pervasive in the reproduction of socioeconomic status. Furthermore, it is more common that people of differing roles are paid disproportionate amounts, rather than those who are in the same position (i.e. a man being paid more than a woman for the same work). In any case, both scenarios are within the same statistic, and it obscures where the wage gap actually lies.

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  2. Not sure what you mean by "Asian and American" women. Aren't all the women in the study American women? In this case, do you mean white women or is there an international component to this study?

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  3. I am currently writing a brief paper about this topic and it's relation to diversity for another class, so I was excited to see your post! While researching for the assignment I found other studies that showed similar statistics. I can relate to your frustration because not only are there differences between the earnings of men and women, but their race is also a factor. Some of the research I found connected the gap to job differences, but it is important to recognize that some people are limited in their "choices" for work. Just as there are gender dominated professions, there are race dominated work positions causing variances in the calculation for the wage-gap that are often ignored. I attached the link to one of the sources I came across during my research.
    http://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/

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