Pay Gap Research Paper

Words: 804
Pages: 4

Women have made incredible progress during the last century, but they still have a long way to go, or do they? What caught my attention were the women vs. men wage gap in government engineering. The statistics show that women earn seventy seven cents for every dollar that men earn (Sherk, 1). The researchers say that the wage gap depends on the job and the state. Could it also be discrimination? What people haven’t thought about are the reasons why women earn less then men. Although many statistics show the gender gap, what they don’t take into consideration is the education, choice of industry and occupation, hours worked, experience, and career interruptions. Employees who work overtime or do longer shifts tend to get paid more. Workers, …show more content…
To get the interview started, I asked Kim if she felt that her work experience is different from a man’s. She said that her work experience wasn’t at all different from a man’s because they are both there to do the same job. I then asked her what the ratio of women to men was and she said that in government engineering it is two women to every five men. The government is looking for more women to work in this field to try and equal out the ratio. She said that everybody gets paid the same amount of money, no matter if they are a man or a woman. The only time the pay would differ is if the person has a higher education level or a higher G.P.A. Kim mentioned that she has been working there for ten years. What didn’t surprised me was when she said that one of her employees was hired at the same time she was but she gets paid more than him because she had a higher G.P.A. Many people would believe that a woman is finally getting paid more than a man, but my research shows that not to be true. Overall, this interview proved that all else being equal, a woman can make the same salary as a man (Seidel,