Gender Wage Gap: Analyzing Earnings Differences in USA - Essay Sample

Introduction

The gender wage gap is the difference in salaries and earnings in women and women on an average basis in the labor market. There is a big difference in how men and women are paid in the United States of America. The gap, however, has reduced over the past years (Blau, 2017).

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The purpose of the research was to review and analyze the peer-reviewed journal articles, which explains the difference in wage pay between males and females. The study also summarizes the gender wage pay in different employment sectors. There have been various previous researches on the gender wage gap, and in this article, there is a new statistical analysis of the gender pay gap and their possible explanations. The literature review explains further what was learned from the difference in pay and conventional analyses. Statistics support the analysis of the gender pay gap. The main focus was in the united states and full-time workers. An internal gender pay audit such as analyzing different payrolls, analyzing the promotion, hiring, and paying of different genders and making was done.

There are various ways of measuring gender pay gap though each way its pros and cons (Auspurg, 2017). The methods of research used in this paper were qualitative and quantitative types of research. Data were also analyzed using statistical techniques of analysis. The study was based on peer-reviewed journal articles, and data from the US Census Bureau, Pew Research center and Bureau of Labor Statistics. We believe that the data observed applies to most countries.

Literature Review

The gender wage gap has been a concern to many researchers in the past years. The wage gap is more of an economic issue than a social problem because it serves as an essential factor for labor markets decision making, and also it is a predictor for the welfare of various employment sectors. The difference began in 1980. The US census data from 2000 shows that there is a difference in gender pay according to different employment sectors and different earning distributions (Bishu, 2017). However, despite the different employment sectors, men always have a higher pay rate than women within the different earnings distribution (Platt et al., 2016). There has also been an increase in earnings in women since the 1970s. The growth is due to increased stability and independence in women. The government is characterized by the sticky floor and the glass ceiling effects in the difference in wage gender pay. In the United States private sector, however, there are no glass ceiling and sticky floor effects (Blau, 2017).

The leading causes of the wage gap range from gender-specific factors to other general factors. The factors include education levels, experience, status, personal characteristics, and family responsibilities. From the concept that men prioritize work compared to women that men and women work in different industries, but the female-dominated industries have fewer salaries than male-dominated jobs; men occupy the biggest paying work. Also, insufficient women leadership and workplace gender discrimination is a factor in the difference in the pay gap. The gender gap in the education sector in that, more men who graduate from high school go to college as compared to women, explains the difference in the wage gap. Also, men tend to go for higher career fields like engineering, medicine, and law. Women prefer shorter and irregular work, and therefore they end up earning fewer incentives as compared to men. However, in recent years, women are also embracing career fields, and there has been an increase in their wage pays since the 1980s (Cardoso, 2016).

Research Methodology

The study used the qualitative and quantitative types of research to collect data. Qualitative research gives an in-depth understanding of how and why that will be used in decision making. Besides, observations were made through statistical analysis to present the numerical representations. The experiment design was used as it describes the variation of information as per the stated hypothesis. Questionnaires were issued to the respondents, and interviews were also done with a few experts in the wage and gender field.

The questionnaires inquired about the wages of each individual in different employment sectors concerning their gender. Factors that seemed to influence the wage gap were considered. One hundred respondents were interviewed, and their opinions were included in the research to explain the different perspectives of the population. The respondents were from different states, and the study covered only twenty-eight states. Different companies were contacted to allow their workers to administer the questions and to answer the questions without influence from their employers. Data was collected and sampled from previous researches like Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Census Bureau, and Pew research center. The study was limited to workers between the age of 20 to 45. This was done to prioritize the active labor market.

Results and Discussion

US Census Bureau recently analyzed that women working on a full time get paid 80.7 cents about every dollar a man earns working on full time. According to Pew research center, in 2012, in every 84 cents a woman makes, a man makes a dollar. However, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in October that a man makes a dollar in every 81 cents a woman earns.

The estimated annual median earnings of women are $9,909 lower than men's earnings. The gender wage gap varies from different states (Blau, 2017). The average gender pay gap in the US is 19.3% though the gap can be higher or less depending on the state one comes from. For example, in Louisiana, the wage pay difference is 31.2%, and it is the most top wage gap in the United States. The state with a lower wage gap in California, with 10.9%.

From the interviews and questionnaires, men were estimated to have long working hours than women. 26% of men who work full-time work do their jobs for over forty hours in a week while only 14% of women can do that. From the results, women earn approximately 16-19% lower age than men. From the interviews, the reasons for the difference in wages between men and women include; women are not capable of negotiating for higher salaries compared to men and that women are more likely to prefer amenities like short working hours for higher wages. Also, another factor that brings out the wage gap is work discrimination. That implies that the wage-setting and hiring procedures are based on one's gender. Though there is an increase in women with more senior and professional positions in jobs, there a lot of women with less paying careers and occupations.

From Pew Research in 2017, 42% of full time working women have reported cases of gender discrimination in their jobs as compared to 22% of men who said the same. Inequalities in earnings between men and women doing the same job are one of the most reported work discrimination. Only 5% of males reported being paid less in the same job as a woman.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLC) reported that the full-time weekly earnings of females compared to men improved from 64% in 1980 to approximately 84% in 2012. In 2017, women working on a full-time basis earned 80% of what men earned. In 2018, however, women's earnings increased to 85% that of men. From this analysis, it might take roughly 39 days extra for these women to earn the same wage as men.

The wage gap is lower for younger adults as compared to old adults. In 2019, Women in the age bracket 25-35 earned 89 cents about one dollar a man made in the same age bracket. In 1980, the gap was very different as women only received 33% of what men earned.

Top paid jobs experience a difference in the wage gap. For example, a female manager earns $65000 a year while a male manager earns $100000 in the same field. This gap explains the wage difference, and it affects women wages over time.

In different occupations, men receive fewer wages than men. For instance, doctors and physicians are receiving $ 19 billion less from what men receive annually in the same occupations. Giving women a chance to earn what men earn will enable them to collect billions annually.

Women from different ethnic groups and different races get paid less as compared to men from the same ethnic group or race (Auspurg, 2017). Hispanic women earn less as compared to blacks, whites, and Asian workers. As of 2018, Hispanic women workers earned a median of $600 working full-time every week. Black women made $650 working full-time every week. The Asian women earnings are 90% of what white women get paid full-time working weekly.

From the t-test, t >1, this leads us to reject the null hypothesis that for men and women, the average wage is the same at 5% significance level. Therefore, at the 5% level, the wage is statistically significant. The 5% chance that the average wage gap of men and women is because of errors from sampling rather than the actual average wage gap in men and women is lower in the population (alternative hypothesis).

From the research, women take more breaks from their job to take care of their families as compared to men. Situations like motherhood can also interrupt with women's career, and this affects their earnings. 42% of women decreased their hours of work while 39% took their time off to take care of their families. Approximately 27% of women quit their jobs due to family responsibilities. Only 24% of men reported to take their time off for family responsibilities.

Statistical Analysis

To analyze the difference in wage between men and women, the independent variables like education and gender were used in the research. The methods of statistical analysis that were used include Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), regression analysis, contingency tables, the test of hypothesis for one population and two populations, correctional analysis, and test of independence.

Contingency tables were used to test the homogeneity of gender and education in comparison with wage. Regression analysis provides for studying the various effects of different variables that are used. In this case, regression analysis was used to examine the difference in gender and their wages. Analysis of Variance was used to test the significance of the difference between salary and gender. The hypothesis for experimenting ANOVA is:

H0: a0= a1=...= ak (4)

This implies that in two groups or more, the mean is different.

Contingency Tables and Test of Homogeneity

From a total of 100 respondents, 50 were male, and 50 were female. The table below shows the relation between annual wage range and gender of different respondents...