'The Truth About the Pay Gap'

I'm currently taking a political science class on 'poverty and society' with Ken Nuger. I think his habit of sitting with legs spread open all the time is hilarious, but that's another story. He was going over various types of inequality in class yesterday, and he briefly discussed about the pay gap between females and males. Women are paid 70 cents for every dollar men make; for the same job and with the same qualifications, or so he said. I wanted to raise my hand and disagree, but being super shy, meek, timid, etc, I didn't. I'm going to provide a response on the 'interwebz' instead. Take that Nuger!

Right out of college, with the same degree, vying for the same job, a women will start out with less money than her male counterpart. But an article titled, 'The Truth About the Pay Gap' argues that it's not necessarily discriminatory practices that is causing the gap, but more subtle issues:

1. Women tend to enter professions such as teaching, psychology, and the humanities, instead of higher paying professions such as business or engineering, and are more likely to go into non profit work and local government.

2. The homemaker role is still mainly attributed to the the wife and the mom, so woman tend to be more family oriented. Women often take time off on maternity leave, and work less in order to spend time with their kids. So on average, men tend to put in more hours at work.

3. Women aren't told to be leaders. Those in power are men, and in their collective psychology, women don't attempt to reach the highest positions of power.

If women were paid less to do the same job, by the same logic, more employers would hire women in order to be more cost effective! I think the notion of a discriminatory pay gap is a scapegoat to the real issue - institutionalized gender roles. How are we supposed to remedy that? Stop giving girls Barbie’s and discourage them from playing "wedding" or "house" when they're younger. Instead make them play "power-hungry CEO" or "career driven doctor who ignores his family."

I'm only half joking I suppose. The issue is a lot more complicated. There's a book called 'Why Men Earn More,' and there is an article on Wikipedia that disputes the validity of the statistic of '70 cents to a dollar', but I'm not writing a research paper here thank god! I need sleep.

-Michelle Park