Imagine this: a seven year old girl comes home from school and sees two big chocolate chip cookies in the cookie jar. She smiles and politely asks her father for a cookie. Her father gives her brother a full cookie, but she only gets three quarters of one. Now ask yourself this…why would she get less than him? Well, that’s exactly what the wage gap is.

Another Day Another 78 Cents

    The wage gap has been the topic of debates since our country was created. What is there to debate, though? The wage gap is nothing less than a problem that shouldn’t even exist.

    The wage gap, simplified, is the status of women’s salary in relation to men’s. According to the National Women’s Law Center, women make 78 cents to each dollar a man makes. Of course, this number is just an average for states in the USA, and can change with profession and even region. Even though the wage gap has been getting smaller over the past few decades, the gap actually widened in 2015. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), the ratio increased from 82.5 percent in 2014 to 81.1 percent in 2015.  

    Most of the arguments against the wage gap talk about how men and women don’t work in the same field. This has nothing to do with the wage gap. There will always be women in the same fields as men, and though both genders are doing the same thing, the men are usually paid more. Even in jobs that are considered to be ‘pink-collar jobs’ such as housekeeping cleaners and registered nurses, men are still paid more than females. Male nurses make at least 5,000 dollars more on average than a female nurse a year, according to IWPR.

The Paycheck Fairness Act

    The Paycheck Fairness Act is a bill introduced in 2013 that would amend the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which has done almost nothing to close the wage gap. The bill would improve equal pay act remedies and modify the “Establishment” requirement. One supporter of the bill is Barbara Ann Mikulski, who is the senior United States Senator for Maryland. Mikulski actually helped create the bill, and though the bill has been introduced to every Congress since 1997, she hasn’t given up on it. And neither should we.

   “Equal pay is not just for our pocketbooks. It’s about family checkbooks and getting it right in the law books. The Paycheck Fairness Act ensures that women will no longer be fighting on their own for equal pay for equal work,” Mikulski said.

Equality For All

    For as long as we, the human race, can remember, women and men have never been equal. Women have had to fight for the rights that were just given to men. Before the 1970’s women could be fired for just being pregnant. Remember the little girl up above? She’s grown up now, and she still receives three quarters of a cookie compared to her brother. Women shouldn’t just get three quarters of something. We deserve the full chocolate chip cookie.

Read the companion story: Inequality on the court