Gender Pay Disparities

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Data on wages earned by college graduates show that “median pay for men exceeded that for women three years after graduation in nearly 75% of roughly 11,300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs at some 2,000 universities” (Class Notes, “Gender Pay Gap Starts Early”). These pay disparities have been hard to explain in today’s society because of the legislation that has been passed throughout the years and women’s evolving role in the workforce, but economists are trying to explain the gap and have considered many causes. I do think that the pay disparities between men and women that still exist today are hard to explain, but I also believe that part of the phenomenon is due to the type of occupations that women enter and the role that …show more content…
In contrast, today the share of women obtaining a bachelor's degree has increased, and these gains in education have raised the average earnings of women and “have narrowed the gender pay gap overall” (Greenwood, 2023). Yet, the wage gap has been stagnant since 2004 (Carlton, 2023). The progress made in the last half of the 20th century was significant, yet, what could have changed to halt that growth in the 21st century? To start, I believe that although women have begun to enter male-dominated professions, women are still entering professions that typically earn lower wages. Women are “still underrepresented in managerial and STEM occupations” yet overrepresented in jobs like “education, health care, and personal care and services occupations” which “are lower paying than the average across all occupations” (Greenwood, 2023). For example, the jobs with the highest share of female workers include skincare specialists, preschool and kindergarten teachers, legal secretaries, dental hygienists, and speech-language pathologists, all of which are typically lower-paying careers (Class Notes, “America’s Workforce by Race and