![]() ![]() Why is there still such a disparity? Why Such a Wide Wage Gap After Nearly Four Decades?Ī variety of explanations for the persistent wage gap have been offered. Women earned 59% of the wages men earned in 1963 in 2012 they earned 80.9% of men's wages-an improvement of about half a penny per dollar earned every year. The wage gap has narrowed, but it is still significant. The workplace has changed radically in the decades since the passage of the Equal Pay Act.īut what has not changed radically, however, is women's pay. The blatant discrimination apparent in these court cases seems archaic today, as does the practice of sex-segregated job listings. Ruled that employers cannot justify paying women lower wages because that is what they traditionally received under the "going market rate." A wage differential occurring "simply because men would not work at the low rates paid women" was unacceptable.An employer cannot, for example, change the job titles of women workers in order to pay them less than men.Ĭorning Glass Works v. Ruled that jobs need to be "substantially equal" but not "identical" to fall under the protection of the Equal Pay Act.Two landmark court cases served to strengthen and further define the Equal Pay Act: Schultz v. 1971 back wages totaling more than $26 million were paid to 71,000 women. The act was gradually expanded over the next decade to include a larger segment of the workforce, and between June 1964 and Jan. The Courts Nix the "Going Market Rate" for Women Demonstrable differences in seniority, merit, the quality or quantity of work, or other considerations might merit different pay, but gender could no longer be viewed as a drawback on one's resumé. It wasn't until the passage of the Equal Pay Act on J(effective June 11, 1964) that it became illegal to pay women lower rates for the same job strictly on the basis of their sex. Separate, of course, meant unequal: between 19, women with full time jobs earned on average between 59–64 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned in the same job. Jobs were categorized according to sex, with the higher level jobs listed almost exclusively under "Help Wanted-Male." In some cases the ads ran identical jobs under male and female listings-but with separate pay scales. Until the early 1960s, newspapers published separate job listings for men and women. Not only did employers fail to heed this "voluntary" request, but at the war's end most women were pushed out of their new jobs to make room for returning veterans. ![]() Since 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was signed, the closing of the wage gap between men and women has been at a rate of about half a penny a year.īecause of the large number of American women taking jobs in the war industries during World War II, the National War Labor Board urged employers in 1942 to voluntarily make "adjustments which equalize wage or salary rates paid to females with the rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations." ![]() ![]() The wage gap is expressed as a percentage (e.g., in 2014 women earned 78.6% as much as men) and is calculated by dividing the median annual earnings for women by median annual earnings for men. The wage gap is a statistical indicator often used as an index of the status of women's earnings relative to men's. ![]()
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