Gender Pay Gap: Exploring What It Is and Its Impact on Women and Families

In most cases, companies decide on a worker’s wage depending on several factors. This often includes their education, skills, and years of work experience. This makes it seem like all is fair and everyone receives wages equally.

But in many years, there has been an ongoing battle for equality. This involves differences in age, race, ethnicity, and the most common, gender. This shows how unequal wages are between men and women.

What is a Gender Pay Gap?

This term describes the difference between how companies pay men and women workers. It is how firms measure the value of all genders within the workforce. Data shows gender pay gaps in percentage or dollar figure.

This value shows how much a woman gets for every dollar a man receives. This difference also often shows how much less a woman receives than a man does. Experts calculate this gap in numerous ways. But the outcome shows that women earn less than men.

Gender Pay Gap Statistics

Today, more companies are using various ways to help narrow this gap. But data still shows that in 2022, women earn 17% less than men. This means women receives 82 cents for each dollar that men get.

In the legal field, men earn an average of 59% more than women. In addition, women of color belong to the lowest-paid workers in rural areas. This means that Black and Hispanic women earn 56 cents for each dollar a white male makes.

Also, Latinas earn an average of 54% of what white, non-Hispanic men receives. On the other hand, native American women receives only 58% of what white men earns. This means that at the age of 20, a woman starting a full-time job could lose around $407,000 in the next 40 years. This is in comparison to earnings of her male counterpart.

Facts About Gender Pay Gaps

1. Statistics – Overall, women receive less than men earn. A fulltime working woman receives only 83.7%than a man does for the entire year. This gap is more obvious for Black and Hispanic women.
2. Causes – The exact causes of the gender pay gap are hard to pinpoint. But it is obvious that it shows that most companies undervalue women at work. One of the main contributors to this is that women tend to accept low-paying job with fewer benefits more than men.
3. Education – On average, women have more years of education than men. But this does not help close the gender pay gap. This means that women need to have more educational levels to receive the same pay as men.
4. Age – As women age, gender gap becomes wider.
   
5. Occupations – The biggest known cause of gender pay gaps are the differences in fields and jobs men and women can work in. For jobs that pay less than $30,000 yearly, fulltime women workers are two out of three. On the other hand, for jobs paying $100,000 or more, there is and average of less than 1 women out of three fulltime workers.

Fathers Earning More, Mothers Earning Less

There is a gender stereotype going on for years within the American work culture. This becomes more obvious when workers become parents. Studies show that upon becoming parents, mothers receive less pay while fathers receive pay increases. This unfortunate event may be one of many factors that add and keep gender pay gaps.

This shows how most companies treat mothers and how they compensate fathers more. When men become fathers, they tend to work longer hours and aim to receive bonuses. Experts refer to this as the “fatherhood wage premium.”

On the other hand, women go through something experts refer to as “motherhood penalty.” Experts believe this involves conscious and subconscious prejudices against mothers. Most companies tend to view working mothers with less competence and commitment.

The same study also says that the fatherhood premium has a major effect on widening the gender pay gap. As a result, dads ages 25 to 54 significantly earn more than men and women, despite of their status.

Impact on Families

A good educational background and a splendid work ethic just cannot cut it for a woman to support her family. This is an obvious result of the gender pay gap. Despite a having a degree and working longer hours, most working women still struggle to pay the bills and support their family.

Most women in the workplace face sexism due to their roles as mothers. This means they have more childcare or caregiving responsibilities. As a result, this puts a negative notion about mothers in the workplace.

In addition, there is also a lack of support for mothers at work. Sadly, the U.S. does not have a national paid leave policy. Also, there is a lack of affordable childcare. As a result, most working mothers choose to stay at home to care for the kids than return to work.

All these elements involve gender pay gaps one way or the other. To help close this gap, companies must push to invest on tools that foster salary transparency. Aside from that, pushing for more laws about equal pay will also be an immense help. Without these changes, women will continue to see unfair treatment and small possibility of closing the gap.

Gender pay gap has been a consistent issue that affects women. Sadly, when they become mothers, they face more struggles than men. Unless companies consciously try to get rid of unfair practices, the gender pay gap will continue.