In our Western society, there is an ever-increasing debate about how rampant sexism seems to be in politics, the media and the economy. One such argument used by many third-wave feminists and other believers in Western sexism is the existence of a gender wage gap between men and women; these groups of people claim that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. This statistic has become so popular and accepted that even the President of the United States himself has commented on its existence, but does the gender wage gap really exist? To answer any question that doesn't have such a clear answer, you need to first break it down into basic components and then build from there, just like demolishing and renovating an old structure, or dissecting a frog, we need to analyze the gender wage gap. , and not just the underlying statistics that give life to the myth, but the term itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay “Gender Gap” is made up of two words, “gender,” which can be defined as biologically male or female, and gap, which is a larger amount of space between two things. Putting these two words together makes clear an inequality between the sexes, which economically is true, but adding another word makes it go from statistical fact to outright falsehood; the word referred to would be “salary”. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines wages as “payment usually in money for labor or services usually on a contract basis and on an hourly, daily, or piece rate basis.” In the United States wage is typically an hourly rate, which determines how much you get paid in a day depending on the work you do that day, and in turn, how much you get paid per week based on the total daily amount you earn. So, putting all this together, we arrive at a phrase that would roughly translate to “a greater amount of space between the hourly wages of male workers and that of female workers,” meaning men are paid more than women. This, quite simply, is false, and here's why. A number of tests can be applied to this debate to discredit any signs of sexism in terms of wages between men and women. There are a myriad of arguments that discredit anything about current wage inequality due to sexism, one such argument would be “if women are paid only a fraction of what men earn (say 77% of what men earn) , so why not do it? Do companies hire predominantly women?” which makes perfect logical sense, if I'm an employer looking to hire two people and I can save over 20% by hiring one candidate over the other, I'll up the cheapest one every time. So why don't we see women making up the vast majority of the workforce? The reason is that this “wage gap” results from poorly applied statistical information. As stated previously, the gender “wage” gap is said to be a 23% difference between men's and women's salaries in favor of men (i.e. women earn only $0.77 for every dollar a man earns ). President Barack Obama himself used this statistic in his 2014 State of the Union address, but where did this number come from? Well, while looking into this statistic, I came across the exact number, taken from the United States Census Bureau's 2010 report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States. In this report, collecting all thecombined annual earnings of men and women in the United States, a wage gap of 77 cents on the dollar is shown to exist (source A, pages 12-13). Now it would seem that this ends the entire debate, men obviously outearn women by a significant percentage. But a fatal flaw when trying to prove the existence of the gender wage gap is in one word, a word that has already been defined in this analysis, wage. When we look at the statistics, we don't look at the hourly wages of every man and woman in the United States, but we look at the annual salary, the annual earnings of men versus those of women, and there's a very big difference between " salary” and “earnings”. As stated previously, wages are “payment usually in money for work or services usually under contract and on an hourly, daily, or piece rate basis” while Merriam-Webster defines earnings as “money received as wages or earned as profit.” Looking at these two definitions, you can see that earnings are primarily based on salary, but not just the raw salary you are set at, but it is based on the salary increments you are paid based on several factors. So, in essence, the term “gender wage gap” is wrong, it is not so much an economics debate as it is correct diction, the correct term should be “gender wage gap”. When we look at these earnings, there is clear inequality, and here's why. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, when taken as a national average across all jobs, full-time and part-time male workers will work more hours per day than full-time and part-time female workers. -time workers, the exact statistic is 8.5 hours for men and 7.6 hours for women, or approximately one hour a day or 7 hours a week if you work all 7 days (source B) , now let's analyze it. The annual wage gap is exactly $36,931 per year for women compared to $47,715 per year for men (source A). Now, if we simplify the situation by reducing it to two people, say a woman and a man, who both earn the same amount per year based on their respective sex, and then we assign each the same wage, which on average for all non-agricultural wage workers is 25.79 dollars/hour (Source C), and also applying the added hours the man will work more than the woman (I will take into consideration 6.3 hours more than women) we can see that, for the same salary but more hours chosen to work, a man will make $162.48 more per week than a woman, or $8,448.80 more than a woman per year, based solely on the likelihood that men work more hours per week compared to women. This narrows the annual pay gap to about $2,335.20 in favor of men when hours worked per week are taken into account. The pay gap can also be attributed to specific specialization and job choices between men and women. According to the American Association of University Women's report titled "Graduating to a Pay Gap The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College Graduation," men dominate fields such as "Computer and Information Science" and "Engineering and Engineering Technology" , while women dominate healthcare and education sectors (source D, figures 3 and 4). According to the same study, female social science graduates will earn only 66% of what engineering graduates will earn one year after graduation, and male social science graduates will earn only 70% of what male engineering graduates will earn ( Source D, page 13). ). There is still a pay gap between male and female workers withsame majors a year after college, but this can also be attributed exactly to the occupation they hold, obviously some types of engineers will earn more than others. The AAUW study looked at many other variables, such as college students' GPAs among men and women, how many jobs men and women held on average one year after graduation, and the marital status of men and women in the workforce. After taking all this into consideration, it was found that there remains an unidentifiable gender wage gap of 6.6% in favor of men, which coincides with the US Department of Labor report “An Analysis of the Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women” which places earnings by gender or gender the pay gap after considering all variables was 4.8% and 7.1% (Source E, page 35). So the new adjusted gap appears to indicate that women earn $0.93 versus $1.00 for men, which is a marked improvement, but then what constitutes this “unexplained” pay gap? The difference, this time, is not in education or economic choice, but in the psychological difference. A 2012 Stockholm School of Economics report entitled “Gender Differences in Negotiation Initiation: Does the Gender of the Negotiating Counterparty Matter?” It was found that, compared to women, men were 1.5 times more likely to negotiate for higher pay, 28.1% of women were willing to negotiate, compared to 42.5% of men, leading to a 14% difference in salary negotiation (Source F, page 10). A similar study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University took place after Linda C. Babcock, an economics professor at the university, received numerous complaints from her female students that only male students were given full teaching opportunities, while females were only give teaching assistant opportunities. , When Babcock took the complaint to his boss, he learned that there was a very simple explanation: "The principal said that each of the boys had come to him and said, 'I want to teach a class,' and none of the women had done that,” he said. "The students expected someone to send out an email saying, 'Who wants to teach?' "The incident prompted Babcock to begin systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what he found was that men and women are often different when it comes to initiating negotiations (Source G). Babcock found that among graduating master's students who had received job offers, when asked whether they simply accepted the starting salary offered or tried to negotiate for more. Four times as many men (51% of men versus 12.5% ​​of women) said they had pushed for a better deal. Those who negotiated their starting salary tended to be paid more as a result of their negotiation, how much more exactly? According to Babcock, 7.4% more, almost exactly the same percentage of the gender pay gap that was not explained by the AAUW study and the US Department of Labor report (source G). Now that all factors have been considered, the gender pay gap has been roughly accounted for within a percentage, plus or minus a small amount of statistical error. However, one question still remains: why are men more likely to negotiate for higher pay? Women, on average and despite any difference in pay or negotiable wages, tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, and therefore less likely to negotiate for something better. According to the New York Times, the man most.