Wage Gap Women

Words: 1671
Pages: 7

What kind of impact does the gender wage gap have on women? For one, it has a negative impact on the health of working women. Jonathan Platt, a professor in the school of public health at Columbia University, and his colleagues conducted a study of depression and alcoholism on the U.S. population. The results showed that women who are directly affected by the gender wage gap have a higher risk of depression 1.9 and anxiety 2.5 times higher than men (Platt et al. 4). When discussing the reasons why women might be this affected by the gap, Platt et al. found that discrimination was the likely cause of this. Many women are not valued for their contributions and achievements at work, and they may be expected to then return home after work and take …show more content…
There have been debates over whether or not the gap exists, or if it is a myth created by the government. As mentioned before, there are justified reasons for the wage gap, and the side opposed to the existence of the wage gap being due to discrimination argues that these explained reasons are the only reasons for the wage gap. However, the wage gap is calculated with regard to these justified explanations, and the results still show that the wage gap exists. What is meant by this is that the wage gap is calculated separately for part-time workers and full-time workers, separately for employees with different working hours, separately for different education levels, separately for mothers and non-mothers, and so on (Auspurg et al. 179). A specific example, the American Association of University Women reported to have found that even after controlling education, hours, and economic status variables, American women still earn less than men after college graduation (H. Lips 223). As for the argument that women become less productive at the arrival of their child, legal cases and the research associated with them prove that woman do not lose productivity because of their children (Chirillo et al.). It should be mentioned that the misperception that women become less productive at work when they have children cause employers to be less willing to offer the women new opportunities, such as a promotion, travel opportunities, a new project, etc. Another argument against the existence of discrimination in the gender wage gap is that women might just choose to have a lower paying job than men as a sacrifice to take care of the house and children and/or other family members, but evidence has revealed that women are just less likely to be aware of their options. Relating to what was mentioned in the above paragraphs, teaching young women in high schools about their options outside of low-paying, female-dominated jobs has