By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
Chances are you’ve probably heard of the ‘78 cents to a dollar’ slogan before. The gender pay gap between men and women is a big topic in America and has been for some time. President Barack Obama especially played a big role in spearheading the idea into the mainstream and common conversation. But the wage gap is much more complex than a slogan and has far too often been misinterpreted and misunderstood, which unfortunately takes away credibility from this very real concept and pushes some critics to deny its existence.
The ‘78 cents to a dollar’ slogan is often entirely misunderstood. What it really means, is a reference to a 2013 study that found overall, women earn 78 cents to a man’s dollar. It doesn’t mean a woman is explicitly being paid less for the same job a man has, which is actually illegal and has been since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. (Although gender-based discrimination still does occur to some degree). The ‘78 cents to a dollar’ line is meant to describe overall wages for women in general, not specific events of a woman literally earning only 78 cents to a dollar for a man’s earnings in the same job. But even in the correct connotation, there’s some nuance to it. This is because the original study doesn’t accurately represent individual wages because it’s not meant to. The original study in which this line comes from only looks at specific work fields and doesn’t take into account exact job choice or the same jobs, education, or hours worked, only generalized work fields. And so using the ‘78 cents to a dollar’ slogan may seem like an efficient way to get across how women are mistreated in the workforce, but you may want to choose your words more carefully because you could be unknowingly telling a twisted and fantastical version of the truth which has consequences; you’re ignoring the real issue, and if ever in conversation with someone who doesn’t believe in gender discrimination in the workforce, they will almost always catch you on this because they probably know all the right arguments to make against these misinterpreted statistics. But once these misconceptions are cleared away, we can get to solving the real root problem.
Make no mistake, none of this is to suggest the nonexistence of the gender pay gap or to downplay it. There’s an obvious sign of a big problem when for example a field like teaching where women make up around 70 percent of the field are still earning less than men overall. Despite most analytical studies accounting only for generalized overall earnings and not individual wages, there is still a visible problem, but what is it?
So the question of the gender pay gap isn’t “Why are jobs paying women less?”, because that’s not really a truthful statement, it’s “Why aren’t women getting into the same higher paying positions as men?” This question is a much better-phrased way to spark discussion and is aimed at the real root of gender discrimination in the workforce instead of attacking what is essentially a strawman. But this is also a much more complex question to solve because now we’re dealing with a multifaceted and complex concept consisting of all sorts of socio-economic ideas, so there is no simple catch-all definite answer, but there are a lot of factors experts say to contribute.