Established 1826 — Oldest College Newspaper West of the Alleghenies
NEWS

Growing pains: Gender pay gap causes concern for graduating females

By Emily Williams, Senior Staff Writer

With graduation fast approaching, Miami's seniors have their eye on the prize - a job. While finding a fulfilling career is paramount, with student loan payments and the demands of becoming financially independent, wages are important.

Despite the progress that has been made in achieving gender equality in the workplace, the 52 percent of Miami students who are female will be entering a work force in which men, on average, are still paid significantly more than women.

April 14 marks this year's Equal Pay Day, a day symbolizing how far women have to work into the new year to earn as much as men did the previous year. The day, originated in 1996 by the National Committee on Equal Pay, was started to spread awareness about the continued pay gap between men and women's earnings.

According to data from the Census Bureau, women currently make only 78 cents for every dollar men make. Ohio ranks 34th in the nation in terms of the gender pay gap, with women earning 77 percent of what men do.

Jane Goettsch, the director of Miami's Women's Center, encourages students to learn more about why the gender wage gap exists.

"The personal consequences, in terms of lost income over a lifetime, are staggering," Goettsch said. "The wage gap has barely budged in a decade."

Although significant progress has been made in the last 50 years to reduce this gap, statistics from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) have found this progress has slowed over the past 10 years. If the current rate persists, the pay gap will not be closed until 2139.

Tyler Nichols, the historian for Miami's organization Feminists Working on Real Democracy (F-Word), noted that the discrepancy is wider for women of color. The 2014 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisors shows that African American women make 64 percent of what white men are paid while Hispanic and Latina women make only 54 percent.

"I think the first step in fixing the pay gap is making people aware of what's going on," said Nichols.

Despite the continued discrepancy in pay, since the mid-1990s, women have been more likely to attend and graduate from college than men. The same White House Council report indicates that 25 to 34-year-old women are now 21 percent more likely to be college graduates than men and 48 percent more likely to have completed graduate school.

However, these annual wage statistics differ from those that measure the gender pay gap based on hourly wages which indicate a difference of only 13 cents, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) December 2014 report.

Enjoy what you're reading?
Signup for our newsletter

The discrepancy between the annual and hourly pay gaps can be explained in part by the higher likelihood of women to take jobs with more flexible hours and to work fewer hours of overtime. The statistics on the hourly wage gap also fail to include any salaried positions, while annual statistics do.

Women's lifestyle choices also factor largely into how much their pay differs from men. The BLS found that for unmarried women, the annual pay gap is drastically smaller than that of women as whole; they make only five percent less than men.

The lower likelihood of women to enter certain lucrative careers also contributes to their overall earnings. Although women account for around half of the workforce in the social and life sciences, the higher-paying fields of engineering and computer science are only 13 percent and 25 percent female, respectively.

Chloe Hazen, a senior at Miami who is majoring in Chemical Engineering and minoring in Paper Engineering, has noticed this difference in her time interning.

"I definitely would like to see more woman engineers," said Hazen. "It's very intimidating not only being the only intern in the room … but also being the only woman."

Many of the fields in which women dominate are not as lucrative, such as early childhood education. According to the BLS, only 2.3 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers are male.

Miami's Women's Center, F-Word and Career Services will be collaborating on an observance of Equal Pay Day. They will be passing out information on the gender pay gap in the Armstrong Student Center from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on April 14.

"We hope people will stop by our table to learn more about the gender wage gap, why it exists and ways to address it," Goettsch said.

Read More

Trending