Striving For Equal Work For Equal Pay In Gender Inequality

Equal work with equal pay has been a topic discussed, argued, and debated. For the longest time women have struggled to get their fair share in the money. Women have been downgraded because it is to be believed the men are more “efficient” and more “capable” of doing the job. Women over the years have tried to take action for the lesser amount of pay they get than their male counterparts. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. It required that men and women in the same workplace be given equal pay for equal work

In 2011, a twenty-five year old woman, who was working full-time all year, earned five thousand dollars less than a twenty-five year old man. Full- time working women earn seventy-seven percent of what her male counterparts earn. They would have to work sixty extra days, or about three extra months, to earn what men did by the end of the previous year. Young women wage gap is much smaller. There is a ninety-three percent difference. Young women had caught up to their same age male counterpart.(www.pewresearch.org) The gap is much greater in African American and Latina women, with African -American women earning sixty-four cents and Latina fifty-six cents. (www.whitehouse.gov)

I believe that women should be payed just as much as men. Women put in just as much effort and hard work as men. This had been a struggle for women all over the world. Women try to work harder and harder to get at least a little raise. They should be treated just as fairly as men do. An act for equal pay was passed a long time ago and that didn’t change anything. People say it’s not that big of a gap, but to the women who do so much work, it means everything to them. I believe that there should be a new equal pay law enforced. Fifty percent of people said yes, that an equal pay law would really be enforceable and fifty percent said no. Women are still earning less than men and still fighting for equal pay when their doing equal work.

David Namyst says, “Suppose a company has two product designers, a man and a woman. In accordance with equal pay, they are each paid $70,000 per year. One year, the male designer is very productive, so their employer gives him a raise of, say, $7,000 per year.Would their employer also have to give the woman an equal raise, in order to maintain equal pay? It seems like this would be the case under most equal pay laws being proposed.This is the problem I see with the equal pay movement. You hear the phrase 'equal pay for equal work' so often, but 'equal work' is not easy to quantify. 'Equal work' can't be assumed to mean 'equal position' because people at the same position aren't necessarily paid the same.If an equal pay law were implemented, the government would basically have to audit the salaries and wages of every single male & female employee for every incorporated business in the country. Whenever they find a man being paid more than a woman, they would have to verify that it's justified by some form of merit. Imagine how expensive this sort of investigation would be.An equal pay law is too simplistic to solve this problem.” (David Namyst-(www.debate.org)

In conclusion, the argument over equal pay with equal work will still go on. This argument is going on now with women struggling today in the world. People will still have their opinion about women’s pay. In the end, women are still earning less than men and still fighting for equal pay when doing equal work.