Gender Workplace Discrimination
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- Date Submitted: 05/09/2010 02:21 PM
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Gender Wage Gap Discrimination in Workplace
It has been 35 years since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were signed into law in an attempt to eliminate wage discrimination based on gender. As a testament to the fact that the issue is not yet resolved is the fact that the first major piece of legislation signed by President Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, another attempt to bring equity to the issue. In this case, the question was not whether gender wage discrimination was, in fact in action, but whether the restrictive requirements of Title VII as far as discovery and filing dates had been satisfied. The court in their majority opinion concurred that discrimination had, in fact been practiced. All the articles I read generally agree that there is a differential between the median wage of men and women, although the size of the difference and the trend of the difference are of some contention. The central question is not whether a difference exists, but whether the existence of the difference indicates that wage discrimination is still prevalent.
In her article for Women’s Media in April of 2009 , Evelyn Murphy, former Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University, claims that “Women working full time – not part time, not on maternity leave, not as consultants – still only earn 77 cents for every full time male dollar. The wage gap has been stalled for more than a decade” (Murphy, April 2009). Presenting a contrasting view in her article for Money Magazine, Cristen Conger states “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median wage for female full time workers in the United States was 80 percent of the male median wage in 2007” (Conger, February 2009). She goes on to note the trend: “On the upside for female workers, that gap has narrowed considerably since the BLS began comparing gender wage data in 1979, then women made merely 62 percent...
It has been 35 years since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were signed into law in an attempt to eliminate wage discrimination based on gender. As a testament to the fact that the issue is not yet resolved is the fact that the first major piece of legislation signed by President Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, another attempt to bring equity to the issue. In this case, the question was not whether gender wage discrimination was, in fact in action, but whether the restrictive requirements of Title VII as far as discovery and filing dates had been satisfied. The court in their majority opinion concurred that discrimination had, in fact been practiced. All the articles I read generally agree that there is a differential between the median wage of men and women, although the size of the difference and the trend of the difference are of some contention. The central question is not whether a difference exists, but whether the existence of the difference indicates that wage discrimination is still prevalent.
In her article for Women’s Media in April of 2009 , Evelyn Murphy, former Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University, claims that “Women working full time – not part time, not on maternity leave, not as consultants – still only earn 77 cents for every full time male dollar. The wage gap has been stalled for more than a decade” (Murphy, April 2009). Presenting a contrasting view in her article for Money Magazine, Cristen Conger states “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median wage for female full time workers in the United States was 80 percent of the male median wage in 2007” (Conger, February 2009). She goes on to note the trend: “On the upside for female workers, that gap has narrowed considerably since the BLS began comparing gender wage data in 1979, then women made merely 62 percent...