The Pay Gap

For this paper I did the needed research on the website for the National Committee on Pay Equity. I had always known that there has always been a pay inequality in jobs. That wasn’t all that much of a surprise to me. Though, the thing that was a surprise was just how much of a pay gap that there is between sex and race. I was very much surprised that despite the fact that we’ve been trying to close the pay gap, that the pay gap hasn’t changed much over time. Like as the site says, the pay gap has only decreased by a half a cent a year since the year 1963 when the Equal Pay Act was signed. Women used to make an average of 59 cents to the dollar that men earned. But by 2004 it had raised to 77 cents to the dollar that the men earned.

One of the things that I looked up on the site was the wage gap by education. On the page is a table that lists some races for both men and women, and then gives the wages that they earn depending if they are a High School grad, have their Bachelor’s, or have their Master’s degree from college. I was quite surprised to see that African Americans (both men and women) make the least in the different categories. For example, an African American male that has received his Bachelor’s would make $42,999 a year. While that doesn’t seem all that bad, if you compared it to how much a white man with his Bachelor’s made ($55,307) a year, that is over a $10,000 dollar difference in wages. Then you could also compare that to a African American female with her Bachelor’s to a white male with the same ($36,253). The African American female makes nearly $20,000 less a year. I was surprised by the large gap of pay between males and females depending on their education. But I was more surprised at the difference once you add in race.

Under further research, it is true that the wage gap is much larger between women of color or some other nationality besides white. I found that of full-time workers, black women's median weekly earnings ($429) were only 64% of the earnings of white men ($669). I also