In our Western society, the debate continues to intensify over the extent of sexism in politics, the media and the economy. One of the arguments used by many third-wave feminists and other proponents of Western sexism is the existence of a wage gap between men and women; these groups of people claim that women earn only 77 cents for every 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 pay gap really exist? To answer any question that doesn't have such a clear answer, you must first break it down into its basic elements and build from there, much like tearing down and refurbishing an old structure, or dissecting a frog, we need to dissect the gender pay gap. , and not just the basic statistics that give rise to the myth, but the term itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay “The gender gap” is made up of two words, “gender,” which can be defined as biologically male or feminine, and gap, which is an increase in space between two things. Putting these two words together makes an inequality between the two sexes obvious, which is economically true, but adding one more word turns it from statistical fact to outright lie; the word mentioned would be “salary”. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines salary as "a payment usually in money for work or services, usually pursuant to a contract and on an hourly, daily, or piece-rate basis." In the United States, salary is generally an hourly rate, which determines how much you would be paid in a day based on our work that day, and therefore how much you would be paid per week based on the total daily amount earned . Putting all of this together, we arrive at a phrase that would roughly translate to “increased space between the hourly pay of male and female workers,” as in the following case: men are paid more hourly than women. This is simply false, and here's why. There is much evidence that can be applied to this debate to discredit any signs of sexism in gender pay. There are myriad arguments that discredit existing pay inequalities due to sexism. One of them would be: "If women are only paid a fraction of what men make (say 77% of what men make), then why not do it?" do companies mainly hire women? which makes perfect sense, if I'm an employer looking to hire two people and I can save more than 20% by hiring one candidate over another, I'll increase the cheaper one each time. So why don't we see women making up the overwhelming majority of the workforce? That’s because this “wage gap” comes from misused statistical information. As previously noted, the gender "wage" gap would represent a 23% difference between men's and women's salaries in favor of men (i.e. women only earn $0.77 per every dollar earned by a man). President Barack Obama even used this statistic himself in his 2014 State of the Union address, but where did this number come from? Well, while looking at this statistic, I came across the exact number, taken from the United States Census Bureau's 2010 Income Report,poverty and health insurance coverage in the United States. In this report, collecting all the combined annual earnings of men and women in the United States shows that there is a wage gap of 77 cents on the dollar (source A, pages 12-13). It would seem that this ends the whole debate, with men obviously winning over women by a significant percentage. But a fatal flaw when trying to prove the existence of the gender pay gap lies in a word, a word already defined in this analysis, that of salary. When we look at statistics, they don't look at the hourly wage of every man and woman in the United States, but they look at the annual salary, the annual income of men versus women, and there is a very big difference between “salary” and “earnings”. As stated previously, salary is "a payment usually in money for work or services, usually pursuant to a contract and on an hourly, daily, or piece-rate basis", while Merriam-Webster defines earnings as "the money received as wages or earned as profit.” Looking at these two definitions you can see that earnings are based primarily on salary, but not just the gross salary you are set to, they are based on increases in your salary that are paid to you based on several factors. So basically the term "gender wage gap" is wrong, it's not so much a debate about economics as it is about proper diction, the correct term should be "gender income gap ", when we look at these incomes, there is an obvious inequality, and here's why. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, when considering the national average for all jobs, full-time and part-time male workers will work more hours per day than females. full-time and part-time. workers, the exact statistic is 8.5 hours for men and 7.6 hours for women, which is about an hour per day or 7 hours per week if you work every 7 days (Source B), let's break it down now this. The annual income gap is exactly $36,931 per year for women, compared to $47,715 per year for men (source A). Now, if we simplify the situation to two people, say a woman and a man, both earning the same amount of money per year based on their respective genders, and then assign them each the same salary, which on average for all non-agricultural wage workers was $25.79/hour (Source C), and also applying the added hours, the man will work more than the woman (I will take into account 6.3 hours more than women) , we see that with the same salary but more hours chosen to work, a man will earn $162.48 more per week than a woman, or $8,448.80 more than a woman per year, based solely on the probability that men work more hours per week than women. This reduces the annual wage gap to approximately $2,335.20 in favor of men when taking into account hours worked per week. The wage gap can also be attributed to specific specialization and employment choices between men and women. According to the American Association of University Women's report, "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. areas of health care and education (source D, figures 3 and 4). According to the same study, women graduates in social sciences will only earn66% of what female engineering graduates will earn one year after graduation, and male social science graduates will earn only 70% of what male engineering graduates will earn (Source D, page 13). ). There is still a wage gap between male and female workers with the same majors one year after university, but this can also be attributed exactly to the profession they go into. Obviously, certain types of engineers will earn more than others. The AAUW study looked at several other variables, such as men's and women's undergraduate GPA, the number of jobs men and women held on average one year after graduation and the marital status of men and women in the labor market. After taking all of this into account, it was found that there remains an unidentifiable 6.6% gender income gap in favor of men, which coincides with the United States Department of Labor report “ An analysis of the reasons for the gender wage gap” which put the gender earnings or the gender wage gap after taking into account all variables is 4.8% and 7.1 % (Source E, page 35). So the new adjusted gap seems to indicate that women earn $0.93 compared to $1.00 for men, which is a clear improvement, but then, what makes up this “inexplicable” pay gap? The difference, this time, does not lie in education or economic choice, but in the psychological difference. Economic report entitled "Gender differences in the initiation of negotiation: is the sex of the negotiation interlocutor important ? » it was found that, compared to women, men were 1.5 times more likely to negotiate for a higher salary, 28.1% of women were willing to negotiate compared to 42.5% of men, resulting in a difference of 14% in salary negotiations (Source F, page 10). A similar study by Carnegie Mellon University took place after Linda C. Babcock, an economics professor at the university, received several complaints from her female students that only male students were receiving teaching opportunities full positions, while women only had teaching assistant opportunities. When Babcock complained to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: "The dean said every one of the guys came up to him and said, 'I want to teach a class,' and none of the women had done that,” she said. “Students were expecting someone to send them an email saying, 'Who wants to teach?' The incident prompted Babcock to begin systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she discovered was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations (Source G Babcock found that among graduate master's students who had received job offers, when asked s). Whether they had simply accepted the starting salary offered or attempted to negotiate for a higher salary Four times as many men (51 percent of men versus 12.5 percent of women) said they had done so. pressure for a better deal Those who negotiated over their starting salary tend to be paid more as a result of their negotiation, how much more exactly, according to Babcock, or almost exactly the same percentage of the? wage gap between men and women that remained unexplained by the AAUW study and the United States Department of Labor report (Source.