Gender Pay Gap Analysis

Introduction
In this response assignment I will be analyzing and discussing two articles: “Canada's stalled progress on gender pay gap: Women have 'hit a brick wall'” from the Globe and Mail, along with “Narrowing the Gap” by Kate McIntruff and Paul Tulloch and drawing ideas, connections and extensions based on material we have covered in the course thus far.
Ideas
A concept that I learned about in the two readings was that the gender wage gap isn’t something of the past; it is still a major issue in our country. Even though there has been a drastic increase in female contribution to the workforce this issue is not of the past. Before this article analysis I ignorantly assumed that the primary reason for this wage-gap was because the majority …show more content…
Throughout the course thus far we have discussed in great length different policies and laws that could be implemented to better families and this is an gender wage-gap is an issue that directly impacts family life. A focus of many class discussions included more government involvement in family affairs, strengthening our social safety net, implementing things such as universal child-care, and more flexible employment in order to allow parents, and more specifically mothers, to continue to participate in the workforce. All of these topics are contributors to the gender-wage gap. Using child-care as a specific example, we see many women choose not to work due to lack of flexibility in hours, along with the high cost of childcare. If we were to create some type of universal childcare we may see a shift in more women choosing different types of employment or simply choosing to work and a diminish to some aspects of the gap.
The topic of globalization, in which women began to be strong participants in the workforce, is also something that we discussed. We have seen a large positive shift in traditional gender roles of women. Although even now, discrimination is still an issue and occupations that are perceived as “women’s jobs” (nurses, teachers) are still typically underpaid compared with “men’s jobs” (finances, technology, …show more content…
I have pondered long and hard to try to come up with some ways that we as a country could address this issue and it proved itself to be a difficult task. My mind initially went to creating programs that enable females, specifically mothers, this could help with the issue. Also I thought of the need for encouraging young females to explore careers in business and science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields as options. After coming up with my own ideas, I compared them with some things that are currently in place to address this issue, such as the idea of the “salary top-up” for women. Is giving women a salary top-up, like in the case of Karen Bird, how we are going to fix this issue? Personally, I don’t think that this is the answer that will get to the root of the problem. What would? I think the root of the problem lies with discrimination and the overall stereotypes that continue to be embedded in us regarding the balance of power between men and women, along with stereotypical gender roles. I believe that this is why, although we have seen acts and policies implemented to resolve this issue, such as the Pay Equity Act; we continue to see minimal

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