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Kelly Wilson

Mr. Choi

English 9A

26 November 2017

Skills and Skirts

A man and a woman are working, they share a career, they share work experience, they

share a college education, they share pay inequality. The wage gap, or gender pay gap, is a

difference in the amount a man and a woman get paid. Every dollar that a man makes, a woman

only makes around 76 cents. If two people share the same level of education, the same work

experience, work for the same company in the same occupation why should gender play a role in

their salary? There are laws that prohibit paying men more than women based on gender. Yet the

gap still exists. The wage gap is slowly decreasing, but society needs to stop celebrating progress

that has moved at snail speed and generate solutions to solve the problem.

Women should not be underpaid because America has laws that cannot fulfill their

purpose. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act making it illegal for

employers to pay men more than women for doing the same job. The language in the act is

tricky, making it harder for women to prove they're being underpaid because of their gender, and

allowing loopholes for employers to slip through unscathed. This allows employers to claim that

male colleagues are “paid a higher wage than their female counterparts on the basis of seniority,

merit, productivity, and "a differential based on any other factor other than sex."(bustle.com)

Cheryl Hughes, a divorced mother of two, applied to get her degree in engineering so she could
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support her family. While working Hughes dealt with male majority in her field and throughout

her career she lost $1 trillion because she was a woman. Still women are being underpaid. Still

women are at a disadvantage. Still America is allowing unjust treatment towards people because

what…they're female?

There are too many people who are unaware of the wage gap. Too many people who

know about its effects and choose to ignore it. Even when men and women share the

qualifications, women still get short changed. Women with a college education “... are on

average making $7600 less a year than male counterparts… simply because they are female”

(debate.org). Why are women being payed less for not being a men?​ ​Pay inequality places

everyone at a disadvantage. Continuing to underpay women “...can have far-reaching economic

consequences ...equal pay would cut poverty among working women and their families by more

than half and add $513 billion to the national economy” (iwpr.org). Equal pay for both genders

will do more than place women and men on the same field. Equal pay for both genders will

promote the economy, and society will take a step towards equality.

The wage gap may be​ ​closing slowly, but it shouldn't take this long to fix something that

shouldn't have existed in the first place. If a man earns $15 for an hour of work, women with

equal experience and education should make $15 for an hour of work. Margaret was a cashier in

highschool and she worked at an Italian restaurant with a boy a grade older than her. Margaret

and the boy compared paychecks and she learned that the boy was making more money than she

was for the same job. Margaret complained to her boss who tried to play it off as an age thing,

the boy was older so he got paid more money. Later he admitted that he just thought boys should

get paid more. Imagine being told that you were being paid less because of something you can’t
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change. Imagine being told you’re being paid less because of your gender. When comparing men

and women “...who hold the same jobs, the median salaries are significantly closer.. But there is

still a gap” (payscale.com). America won't be sorry if they encourage equality in pay. Americans

win with equal pay. We win with equal pay. The economy wins with equal pay.

We can no longer sit back and wait for the change we need, we have to fight for what we

believe in, we need to stand together, we need to dissolve gender pay gap. If you were in the

same position as Cherly or Margaret, better yet, if our children were in their place you’d be

enraged. But somehow it becomes okay, because it hasn't happened to you or anyone close to

you… yet. When your shoe is untied, you tie it. When you're hungry, you eat. When your car is

dirty, you wash it. Problem meets solution. We don't sit around and wait for someone to feed us

or wash our car for us... So why are we waiting for someone else to create a solution to the wage

gap, who are we waiting for. I’m tired of waiting for the right thing to be done, or waiting for

society to wake up, or waiting for anyone to realize that women are equal to men, I’m tired of

waiting period. Let’s create the change we want to see and just like we tie our shoe or wash our

car, let's fight for equal pay.

Works Cited

https://www.bustle.com/articles/154078-why-didnt-the-equal-pay-act-close-the-gender-pay-gap-

50-years-later-america-still
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http://www.debate.org/debates/The-gender-wage-gap-is-a-concern/1/

https://iwpr.org/issue/employment-education-economic-change/pay-equity-discrimination/

https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-pay-gap