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Columnist: United States still 23 cents from gender equality

Posted on April 22, 2010, at 2:45 a.m.

The number 23 has acquired quite the stigma as of late. Superstitious folk insist the integer is a sign of evil or terrible happenstance, as evidenced by the 2007 Jim Carrey film made to cash in on the darkness. With the passing of April 20, another instance of the number has affixed itself on the hearts — and paychecks — of women across the nation in the form of a deficit: 23 cents.

Equal Pay Day, which was Tuesday, marks the day that the average American woman worker will have finished earning her 2009 salary, or the amount of money she would have earned by December 31 of last year if she were a man.

The latest data from 2008 indicates career-oriented American females make approximately 77 cents to every male dollar, a 23-cent gap from equality. Minorities fare even worse in the wage war, with black women averaging 68 percent of the dollar and Latino women averaging 58 percent.

Why is it that 47 years after the passing of the Equal Pay Act, women are still struggling to walk in stride with their male equivalents in regards to pay rates? How could it be that in the supposed cease-fire for the battle of the sexes, where women are as common in the office as men, performing the same tasks as men, that the only progress made toward equal pay has been a whopping 18 cents?

The answer to such a question has several facets. For starters, it isn’t as though the issue has been completely overlooked in the political realm.

One of the first actions President Barack Obama performed when inaugurated was passing a bill into law that addressed the pay gap, and the Senate is now considering another bill that prohibits underlying discrimination when it comes to equal compensation. If nothing else, though, such actions indicate there is an injustice even the government can’t ignore.

Another important observation to make in analyzing the cost conundrum is the types of occupations women with advanced education most often pursue. A majority of the most educated women in the country tend to seek jobs in the fields of teaching and nursing, while the men with comparable degrees are more likely to enter into the world of business, science and law as executives, doctors, and lawyers — positions that naturally procure more wealth.

Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, insists there is more to the motives of women’s job choices than meets the eye.

“Why do you think [male-dominated industries] are sex-segregated? Very often, women aren’t welcome there,” O’Neill said in an interview with Time published Tuesday. Such exclusivity is perpetuated by the lack of female role models in the manly realms of business and science, leading younger generations of girls to pursue traditional occupations where women are easily accepted, but paid far less.

In some cases, even industry norms cannot overshadow blatant discrimination. Information from 2007 showed that even in the secretarial profession, female secretaries earned only 83.4 percent of what their male counterparts did.

A 2008 study conducted by a University of Chicago sociologist and a New York University economist tracked the wage variations of individuals who underwent a sex change and found that males transitioning to females earned about 32 percent less in salary following their operation. Meanwhile, females transitioning into males garnered an average of 1.5 percent more after surgery. It certainly seems like sex still factors too heavily into how much is going into one’s wallet or purse.

On the table, 23 cents doesn’t seem like much. You can’t use it for a gumball or any of the other vending machines outside the supermarket. It has more of a chance landing between the couch cushions than anywhere else. But when it comes off of every dollar you make in a day, the figurative coins start to pile painfully high.

For women, it is approximately $4,000 a year lost somewhere along the hemline of their designer skirts and the befuddled psyche of a nation still not on par with its own ideals.

Who would have imagined 23 cents could be worth so much in the end?

Madelyn Kearns is a sophomore mass communication student.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010, 2:45 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.

Ryan Page

The 23 cents argument is really only applicable for a certain income bracket. i.e. the top tiers of jobs. While it’s unjust, it’s also not effecting the mass majority of women.

This also doesn’t address the type of jobs women take. While there can be no stereotyping a “woman’s job” there are statistical trends for each gender. If, for example, women are culturally biased towards jobs that pay less but are perceived by the workers as more rewarding in a way that is not so easily quantifiable, the situation once again becomes complicated.

Equality is an important part of our culture, especially as an ideal, but there are limits to the amount of control which should be enacted to preserve it. I mean this in the sense that perfect equality is as unachievable as it is boring. I do think there is room for improvement, but the oversimplification of 23 cents on the dollar creates the illusion of some anonymous male figure cutting into women’s paychecks each week, which creates unnecessary blame and tension between the genders.

The exception of course is that if your going to run a company, in this part of the world, you are most likely going to be male. This needs to be addressed, but at the same time, i personally don’t feel anyone needs to be making the exorbitant amounts of money that ceos make. I think the solution in that case would be need to resolve both of those problems.

Issues like this are always more complicated then they’re made out to be. In some ways that’s a good thing, but ultimately if you politicize an issue enough that the people involved aren’t aware of the full complexity, things can become unproductive.

There is a need for this type of dialogue, especially in relation to the rest of the world, because globally, there is no question that women are oppressed (at least from our cultural standpoint). However I often feel that in the united states feminism (used loosely) has often devolved in academic recursion and, at it’s worst, thoughtless ideology.

I don’t mean to criticize the article for its standpoint, but rather that it fails to preserve of the complexity of a very important issue.

Columnist: United States still 23 cents from gender equality

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