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Is the Gender Pay Gap: Fact or Fiction

6 Pages 1475 Words May 2018

A polarizing topic in American is if the proposed gender-based wage gap is a real or if the American people are being misled by faulty statistics. This topic has been a forefront issue for about the past 10 years. Many groups cite that women in America only make 77 cents for every dollar and man makes. Others explain this statistic as nonexistent when you factor in such things as education, the number of hours worked, years of experience, life decisions, and many other factors.
First, let’s look at how the proposed wage gap is calculated. If you take the salary of all men in the country working a full-time, year-round job, which is defined as 40+ hours a week, and compare that to the salary of all women in the county working year-round, full-time jobs you will find that women earn 77% compared to men. Now you might as many say that this is a terrible thing, that women only make 77% of what women make, but the statistic leaves out many factors. As Christina Hoff Summers, an American bestselling author, philosopher, and resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute states in an editorial for the Huffington Post, “One of the best studies on the wage gap was released in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Labor. It examined more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the 23-cent wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” In the past, women’s groups have ignored or explained away such findings.” When looking at the wage gap it is necessary to take in all related factors.
The first factor left out when factoring the wage gap is the types of degrees men and women are going to college for and types of jobs they are taking. On average women tend not to go into the higher paying fields of study. Georgetown University compiled a list of the 5 highest and lowest earning four-year college majors. In the five highest paying career paths, men comprised a m...

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