A Study of The Different Aspects of Gender Gap in Society

In our western society, there’s constantly increasing debate over how rampant sexism seems to be in politics, media, and economy. One such argument used by many third wave feminist and other such believers of western sexism is the existence of a gender wage gap between men and women; these groups of people claim that women only earn 77 cents to the dollar that men earn. This statistic has become so widely popular and accepted that even the President of The United States himself has commented on its existence, but does the gender wage gap really exist? To answer any question that doesn't have such a clear answer, you must first break it down into basic components and build up from there, much like demolishing and refurbishing an old structure, or dissecting a frog, we must dissect the gender wage gap, and not just the background statistics that drive the myth into being, but the term itself.

“Gender gap” is composed of two words, “gender”, which can be defined as biologically male or female, and gap, which is an increased amount of space between two things.Putting these two words together makes an inequality clear between the two genders, which economically is true, but adding one more word in makes it go from statistical fact, to outright falsehood; the word referred to would be “wage”. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines wage as “a payment usually of money for labor or services usually according to contract and on an hourly, daily, or piecework basis”, in The United States the wage is typically an hourly rate, which determines how much you get paid in a day depending on our worked that day, and in turn how much you would be paid a week depending on total daily amount earned. So putting all of this together, we come up with a phrase that would translate roughly to “an increased amount of space between the hourly payment of male and female workers”, as in, men get payed more hourly than women. This, simply, is false, and here is why.

A range of evidence can be applied to this debate to discredit any sign of sexism in terms of wage between men and women. There are a myriad of arguments that discredit anything about existing wage inequality due to sexism, one such argument would be “if women are paid only a fraction of what men make (let’s say 77% of what men make), then why don’t companies hire predominantly women?” which makes perfect, logical sense, if i'm an employer looking to hire two people, and I can save over 20% by hiring one candidate over the other, I will higher the cheaper one every single time. Then why don't we see women making up the overwhelming majority of the labor force? It’s because this “wage gap” comes from misapplied statistical information. As stated previously, the gender “wage” gap is said to be a 23% difference between men and women’s salaries in favor of men (i.e. women only make $0.77 to every $1.00 a man earns). President Barack Obama even used this statistic himself in his 2014 State of The Union Address, but where does this number come from? Well, examining this statistic, I came across the exact number, from The United States Census Bureau 2010 report on Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States. In this report, it is shown through gathering all combined annual earnings of men and women in The United States, that there is a 77 cent to the dollar wage gap (source A, pages 12-13). Now it would seem that this makes the entire debate closed, men obviously out earn women by a significant percentage. But one fatal flaw when trying to prove the existence of the gender wage gap is in one word, a word that was already defined in this analysis, wage. When we look at the statistics, it does not examine the hourly wage of every man and woman in The United States, yet it examines annual salary, the yearly earnings of men compared to women, and there is a very big difference between “wage” and “earnings”. As stated previously, wage is “a payment usually of money for labor or services usually according to contract and on an hourly, daily, or piecework basis” whilst Merriam-Webster defines earnings as “money received as wages or gained as profit”. Looking at these two definitions, you can see that earnings is based primarily off of wage, but not just off of raw wage that you are set at, it is based off of increments of your wage you are paid based on several factors. So, basically, the term “gender wage gap” is wrong, it is not so much a debate about economics as much as it is proper diction, the correct term should be “gender earnings gap”, when we observe these earnings, there is clear inequality, and here's why.

According to The United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, when taken into account the national average of all jobs, fulltime and part time male workers, will work more hours daily compared to fulltime and part time female workers, the exact statistic is 8.5 hours for men and 7.6 hours for women, which is roughly one hour a day or 7 hours every week if worked all 7 days (Source B), now let’s break this down. The annual earnings gap is exactly $36,931 annually for women as opposed to $47,715 annually for men (source A). Now, if we simplify the situation down to two people, say a woman and a man, both earning that much annually according to their respective gender, and then assign them each the same wage, which on average for all nonfarm payroll workers was $25.79/hour (Source C), and also apply the added hours the man will work more than the woman (I will be taking into account 6.3 more hours than women) we can see that, with the same wage but more hours chosen to work, a man will make $162.48 more a week than a woman, or $8,448.80 more than a woman annually, based purely off of the likelihood of men working more hours a week than women. This narrows the annual earnings gap to about $2,335.20 in favor of men when taken into account hours worked per week.

The earnings gap can also be attributed to specific major and job choice between men and women. According to the American Association of University Women’s report entitled “Graduating to a Pay Gap The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College Graduation”, men dominate fields such as “Computer and Information Sciences” and “Engineering and Engineering Technology” while women dominate fields in Health Care and Education ( Source D, figures 3 and 4). According to the same study, women social science majors will earn just 66% of what women engineering majors will enr one year after graduating, and men social science majors will earn just 70% of what men engineering majors will earn (Source D, page 13). There still exist a pay gap among male and female workers with the same majors one year after college, but this can also be attributed to exactly what occupation they go into, obviously certain types of engineers will make more than others. The AAUW study examined multiple other variables, such as undergraduate GPA among men and women, how many jobs men and women worked on average one year after graduation, and marital status of men and women in the workforce, After taking all of this into account, it was found that there remains an unidentifiable 6.6% gender earnings gap in favor of men, which coincides with the United States Department of Labor report “An Analysis of the Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women” which put the gender earnings or gender pay gap after all variables had been accounted for at 4.8% and 7.1% (Source E, page 35). So the new, adjusted gap seems to point to women making $0.93 to ever $1.00 men earn, which is a definite improvement, but then what makes up this “unexplainable” pay gap? The difference, this time, is not in education or economic choice, but psychological difference.

A 2012 Stockholm School of Economics report entitled “Gender Differences in Initiation of Negotiation: Does The Gender of the Negotiation Counterpart Matter?” it was found that, when compared to women, men were 1.5 times more likely to negotiate for higher pay, 28.1% of women were willing to negotiate, compared to 42.5% of men, leading to a 14% difference in pay negotiation ( Source F, page 10). A similar study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University took place after Linda C. Babcock, an Economics Professor at the university, received multiple complaints from her female students that only the male students were receiving full teaching opportunities, whereas the females were only given teaching assistant opportunities, When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: "The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, 'I want to teach a course,' and none of the women had done that," she said. "The female students had expected someone to send around an email saying, 'Who wants to teach?' " The incident prompted Babcock to start systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she found was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations (Source G). Babcock Found that among graduating master's degree students who had received job offers, when questioned about whether they had simply accepted the offered starting salary or had tried to negotiate for more. Four times as many men (51 percent of the men vs. 12.5 percent of the women) said they had pushed for a better deal. Those who negotiated on their starting salary tended to be paid more because of their negotiation, how much more exactly? According to Babcock, 7.4% more, almost exactly the same percent of the gender pay gap that was left unexplained by the AAUW study and The United States Department of Labor report (Source G). Now that all factors have been covered, the gender pay gap has been roughly accounted for to within a percent, give or take some small amount for statistical error. However, one question still remains, why are men more likely to negotiate for higher pay?

Women, on average and despite any pay difference or negotiable wage, tend to be more satisfied with their job, and therefore less likely to negotiate for something better. According to the New York Times, the most dissatisfied man in will make as much as the most satisfied woman, about $52,000 on average annually ( Source H figure 1). So, why are women so satisfied with jobs that, according to men, pay far too little? Well, according to Pew Research Center, there are differences in what men and women find satisfying when it comes to a job. 24% of women compared to 18% of men said that having a job that “helps society” was extremely important to them, 35% of women compared to 30% of men said that having a job with “good benefits” was extremely important. and 35% of women compared to 31% of men said having a job that they were “able to take time off for childcare and family needs” was extremely important to them. Out of all the satisfaction criteria that Pew Research Center observed, men only outnumbered women in one category, which was 25% of men compared to 22% of women saying that a job with “opportunities for promotion/advancement” was extremely important to them (Source I), which correlates with men being more likely to negotiate for pay and advancement in their workplace, and becoming more satisfied as their salary increases.

As observed, the gender wage gap is a simple word error, that if left to be used incorrectly, will correlate with completely separate earnings statistic to give us a misapplied statistic that makes our economy seem a lot more sexist than it actually is, and that what is actually observed is an “earnings”, “income”, or “pay” gap. It has also been observed that due to hourly differences per week compared to men and women, differences in occupation and major choice in university, and several other factors, the gap is much more exaggerated than it actually is, and rest at around 7% in favor of men. As lastly observed, the final characteristic of women being less likely to negotiate for higher pay due to job satisfaction accounted for roughly the remaining 7%, effectively eliminating the gender earnings gap altogether.

Is sexism completely gone in our society? Of course not, and will not be for many more generations. However, we as a western society have made great leaps in the past hundred years in eliminating sexism to the point where economically and politically, sex is no longer a factor, and is only a variable when it comes to an individual's state of mind, rather than country’s state of mind. I am a firm believer that a woman born in a western, first world society is the most privileged being on the planet, and that due to misapplied statistical analysis we have seen like that the Obama administration has represented, women in our society will continue to see more privilege than men under the guise of “inequality”. I believe that there are some differences in our society that determine how successful someone may be, such as if someone is born into a very rich family versus a very poor family. However, what will always determine your economic well being and the amount you earn is based just off of earning it, as in, how much effort or time you invest into it, how much an individual is willing to risk and dedicate to getting ahead. In our highly capitalist society, the existence of social darwinism makes it so only this risk and drive to do better can propel someone forward in their economic endeavors, and that complaining about a misapplied statistic will only lead to economic collapse of that certain individual, because they are not willing to take their economic responsibility into their own hands and would rather blame it on a shadowed sexist conspiracy.