The narrowing, but persistent gap in pay By: Nikki Graf, Anna Brown, and Eileen Patten; Published: March 22, 2019
In the article The narrowing, but persistent gap in pay insightful explanations into the gender gap are presented. Although the gender gap has gotten significantly smaller over the last fourty years, it has still steadily persisted over more recent years. According to the research conducted in this study, in 2018 woman who are aged twenty-five to thirty-four earn eleven cents short of what men earn. This compared to the thirty-six fewer cents that women of this same age group made to the dollar that men made in 1980 is a significant improvement but is still obviously an issue. In a Pew Research Center study conducted in 2017, forty-two percent of women said that they have experienced discrimination based on their gender at their occupation. Some of this gender discrimination boils down to motherhood. According to this article twenty-seven percent of the women with children interviewed had to quit their job in order to raise their children or take care of other domestic responsibilities. Only twenty-four percent of men said that they had taken off a substantial amount of time off of work to take care of their children. Another surprising statistic portrayed in this article was that twenty-five percent of women said that taking off work for childbirth, adoption, or childcare had a negative impact at their occupation, while only thirteen percent of men conveyed this.
This article sheds light on the fact that the gender gap is still prevalent and probably isn’t going anywhere any time soon. In general women are disadvantaged from the start as gender norms promote woman to seek lower paying jobs and depend on men for more financial support in the form of a husband. However, according to this study there is a lot more going on than just the way women are raised. Even in this day and age a significant portion of women still find that they are being discriminated against at their work. This is surprising considering how far society has come in the realm legality of gender equality. The even more heartbreaking statistic summaries displayed in this article is that women are still being taken advantage of due to their amazing ability to grow another human being. One and four women interviewed for a study in this article admitted that they’ve been negatively impacted by their work due to some form of child rearing, whether it be pregnancy, adoption, or childcare and in another study the same percentage of women admitted that they were forced to quit due to having a child. Better and cheaper childcare services should be provided in order to limit the percentage of women whose occupational goals are being hindered due to motherhood.
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