Kevin Jolly
Staff Writer
One of the biggest examples of factors contributing is motherhood. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mothers are 40 percent more likely than fathers to report childcare issues having negatively impacted their careers. 23 percent of parents claim they’ve been treated as if they weren’t fully committed to their career because of their children. And this is only heightened by the fact that women have a 7 percent higher chance of becoming single parents than men. And only 72 percent of single mothers participate in the workforce. For new parents, men are 96 percent more likely to continue working full time while only 78 percent of women continue after having a newborn. Childcare is also a big deal, with half of all US families reporting not only difficulty finding childcare but women, in particular, claiming they pursued career choices based on childcare issues rather than career-improving issues. 23 percent of women claim to have turned down promotions compared to men and only 15 percent claim this. As you can see, women consistently get the shorter end of the stick in wages when it comes to balancing work and children, when compared to men.
As mentioned earlier, while blatant differences in wages are illegal, there still exists discrimination. According to a Pew Research Center study, around four in ten women claimed to have faced gender discrimination; anything from earning less, being treated as less competent, receiving less support, being passed over for important assignments, or being denied a promotion. A big part of this is because the vast majority of working fields are controlled by men. For S&P 500 companies, only 6 percent of CEOs are women. And globally, women hold only 24 percent of all senior positions. These things alone contribute to the pay gap, but also contribute to discrimination which in itself also contributes to the pay gap.
Another one of the biggest reasons is societal pressures and norms. One of the most famous gender-based effects of media influences in work is the Scully effect. It refers to the fictional character of Dana Scully from the show X-Files. During the show’s peak in the 90s, there was a dramatic spike of women joining STEM fields who claimed they were directly inspired by the character. Media has a powerful influence over the way people will behave or what careers they will deem acceptable to pursue. So when women in the majority of media are portrayed typically as having lower-paying professions than men, it exacerbates the problem. But society, in general, tends to promote certain ideas of what a woman should do and for men vice versa, and usually, this idea results in women focusing less on their careers. Women typically are pressured at an earlier age to start a family, to get married, or to do a lot of things that leave their careers in the background. Women are pressured into choosing what is considered more ‘feminine work’, which is things like teaching younger age groups, nursing, secretarial work, or medical data managers. These fields mentioned are all some of the most female-dominated work fields in the US, and coincidentally, all work fields that pay less than that of male-dominated jobs in the same fields.
Whenever discussing things like gender roles and the pay gap or any other related topics, there is the threat of denial or bigotry. Some misogynistic talking points echoed throughout some, resemble the lines of, ‘Women are biologically more suited for and attracted more towards lesser-paying jobs’. This line of thought is not only another misinterpretation of what the pay gap means but is not wholly based on truth. There has been tons of research into this topic, and some of it does indeed show women are more enthusiastic about these more ‘feminine roles’ but as stated previously, societal pressures are heavily influencing this. It starts to get a lot more complicated when going across the world, but it’s consistent among more conservative cultures and countries that more women make up these lesser-paying jobs, while across more progressive cultures and countries, more women are interested in and work in things like STEM or just higher paying fields in general. But aside from this, pointing out that women are choosing lower-paying jobs, therefore somehow the pay gap doesn’t exist because it’s created by women themselves, misses the point completely. Yet again as I mentioned earlier, the pay gap isn’t meant to point out individual wages being cut smaller for women, but literally to point out the exact concept of why women could be choosing these jobs which coincidentally pay less and to study the overall trend, which ironically is what critics often point out exactly to somehow ‘disprove’ the pay gap.