The Wage Gap--- An essay from the mind of a HighSchool Teen

“This Isn’t sexism, It’s just common sense”

       The greatest argument of the 21st century could possibly be the highly debatable wage gap. The wage gap between the genders, female and male, is a measurement of what women are paid compared to men. According to iwpr.org, women are paid 77 cents to the dollar of a white male, and the fact that people do not take into account the career and lifestyle choices that men and women take suggests that the wage gap statistic is mythical.

When creating the statistic of women earning 77 cents to the dollar of a man the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR)

 took the median salary for a white male, $44,512 and the median for a white female, $36,556 (radford.edu). This statistic turns outs to be that women earn 82 cents to the dollar of a man, which indicates that there is no definite way of measuring the salaries of American workers, because different sites can not even agree. However, what IWPR does not take into account is the fact that women choose different career choices than men. For example, the top five paying careers out of college (with not having to go to a secondary school such as law school or medical school) include, Petroleum Engineer, Astronomer, Political Scientist, Human Resource Engineer, Aerospace Engineer, and Computer Software Engineer.

 For those careers, four out of the five are predominantly male, with Human Resource Engineer being the exception with women edging men out by just two percent. On the other end, the lowest paying careers out of college are, Family and Consumer Sciences, Drama, Elementary Education, Theology and Religious Vocations, and Social Work. These are, except for Theology and Religious Vocations with 62% male, predominantly women. Some of these carriers are almost entirely women with Family and Consumer science being 97% female and Social Work being 87% female (U.S. Census Bureau and the American Community Survey). Women tend to choose careers that do not pay as much as men and in result the data of just raw salary differences does not take into account that women choose to be paid less by going to college for majors that will not pay as much as the ones men choose.

Some people may argue that the reason women do not choose majors such as engineering or computer science is that women are not accepted into those fields or can get jobs in those fields. Many claim that women choose lower paying majors because they simply can't get into higher ones because “they are a woman”. This is simply not true as companies are hiring women and minorities that may not be as qualified as men in order to say that the company is culturally and ethnically diverse. Companies have gone so far as to hire women over men 2:1, as a  writer of the Washington Post States,   

“The finding is based on a survey of nearly 900 faculty members from 371 schools across the country. In a series of experiments, evaluators were presented with profiles of fictional job candidates and asked to rank them according to who was most qualified for an assistant professorship in biology, engineering, economics and psychology. In nearly every case, the female candidates were more likely to be ranked higher, regardless of their lifestyle, area of expertise and the evaluators’ field of research. The one exception was with male economists, who showed no gender bias one way or the other.”...“It never did slow down, and the final tally was roughly a 2 to 1 preference. So, we were surprised.” (Study finds, surprisingly, that women are favored for jobs in STEM, Washington Post). 

In this study, done by a writer of Washington Post, it was found that in a test of 900 professors around the country, they were willing to hire women 2:1 over men to be their assistant. Another article stating this would be, A Harvard Business Review article that stated that large companies that seek to claim diversity would hire a slightly less qualified minority or female over a slightly more qualified white male. Companies want to claim to be diverse to use as a marketing ploy, even if it means hiring slightly less skilled workers. In addition, some people say that minority women get paid even less than men some claim 60% of men's’ salaries. However, what they do not take into account is the pay of identical minority men. For example, if you compare a white male against a hispanic women, (iwpr.org), the hispanic women would make only 55% of what the white male makes. On the other hand if you compare it to a hispanic male the difference only becomes 8%, which shows that data can be skewed and manipulated in order to emphasize a point.

In conjunction with the first paragraph, women make other lifestyle choices, such as birthing/raising children, not working as often as men, and not taking career risks that men take. Over 80% percent of all american women (Pew Research) choose to have children by the time they are 44 years old, and “the average length of maternity leave was 10.3 weeks” (Women's Health). Companies lose large amounts of money this way as over a two month leave can leave projects unfinished, work not done and can even leave an employee or a company without a boss. Women claim they want equal pay for equal work, as stated in the Forbes article, “Equal Pay For Equal Work: The Gender Wage Gap By The Numbers”, but when women indeed to not work the same it shows why they are not paid the equivalent of male counterparts. In addition, men are more likely to choose positions that require lots of travel, that need to be “on call” all of the time, or ones that require the employee to relocate, (according to Forbes, harvard.edu and hbr.org). These things that men are more willing to do are exactly what employers are looking for; companies will pay someone that is willing to do the things mentioned above 10-15% more than someone who is not and will hire people that will do this more which happens to be men.  

In conclusion, women are paid less than men not because of sexism or racism, but because of the lifestyle and career choices made by both genders. Women choose lower paying careers, are less willing to work long hours and relocate, and women take a long maternity leave which results in lost work. The wage gap is nothing about sexism, it does not make men higher than women in any means, but it instead shows the reason why there is a gap if there is even any at all. The wage gap is seemingly mythical because you can not just take raw data against raw data without giving any context of why that is the case instead of providing context and explanation.