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Throughout the decades, American society has often viewed men as the breadwinners of their families, while women were expected to leave their careers altogether in order to care for their families. Nevertheless, as gender norms continue to change, more and more women are returning to the workforce in large numbers, with many modern women embracing both motherhood and corporate life. Although there are many more women in the workforce now than ever before, there is still a problem that is widely talked about and yet still seems to receive little to no attention from businesses and the justice system: the gender pay gap.
The gender pay gap is the difference in earnings between male and female employees. Experts have calculated this gap in a variety of ways, but they have all come to the same conclusion: the average female employee earns less than her male colleagues do. According to the Census Bureau, women earn a mere 82 cents for every $1 earned by men in 2018. The earnings gap is even larger for women of color in the workforce. In 2018, for every $1 earned by white men, Hispanic and Latina women earned 54 cents, Native American women earned 57 cents, Black women earned 62 cents, white women earned 79 cents, and Asian women earned 90 cents. Nevertheless, wage gaps for each of these racial/ethnic groups were calculated based on median earnings data from the U.S. Census Bureau and do not represent each individual woman’s personal experience in the workplace.
There are four reasons the gender pay gap exists to begin with: The differences in the industries that men and women work in, the differences in years of experience, differences in the amount of hours worked, and gender discrimination in the workplace. In terms of the first reason, although gender norms have changed, there is still a lot of job segregation that separates men and women into different industries based on their gender. Predominantly-female occupations, such as nurses and child care workers, usually come with lower salaries and a lot less benefits than predominantly-male industries, such as construction and building. With years of experience, women are more likely to leave the workforce to start their own families and become homemakers, and therefore they have less work experience than their male colleagues. Although paid family leave makes women more likely to return to the workforce, as of March 2019, a mere 19% of workers were given paid family leave by their employers. Moving on to the work hour differences, women usually work less hours to take care of their families and are also more likely to work part-time jobs. This means lower hourly earnings and less benefits compared to those who work full-time jobs. Although gender-based discrimination was deemed illegal back in 1963, it is still a very big problem in corporate America, especially for women of color. More specifically, gender discrimination is most prevalent in workplaces that discourage their workers from discussing salaries with each other and also in workplaces where employees are scared of retaliation. Employers might also discriminate against their female employees when relying on previous salary records while deciding on hiring and compensation. This enables salary decisions
based on other salary decisions, which may have been based on the previous employer’s gender discrimination. This discrimination, whether direct or indirect, ends up following women no matter where they work.
If gender discrimination is still a common problem in the modern workforce, what exactly is being done legally to fight against it? The answer: not much. Although there have been plenty of female employees who have filed class action lawsuits against their company and/or employers, these lawsuits usually end in two different scenarios: The company agrees to settle the lawsuit with a large sum of money, which tends to be millions of dollars, or the courts decide to throw
out the lawsuit altogether because of legal discrepancies.
A good example of the first scenario is the gender discrimination case at Google: Ellis vs Google. In this lawsuit, Google’s female employees alleged that the tech company was paying them less than their male colleagues in the same occupation. The employees also claimed that Google assigned women to lower occupations than men who had the same education and work experience based on their previous low-paying jobs. On May 21, 2021, the Court approved these allegations for class action treatment, and on June 10, 2022, Google agreed to pay $118 million to settle the lawsuit. In addition to paying their employees millions of dollars, Google hired ‘third-party experts’ to figure out how the company can close the wage gap and conduct a fairer hiring and promotion process. However, Google did not publicly admit to any wrongdoing.
For the second scenario, take the case of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. vs. Dukes. A woman named Betty Dukes, who was a greeter at Wal-Mart, and five other female employees filed a class action lawsuit against the company, in which they claimed that Wal-Mart’s policies resulted in female employees getting paid less than their male colleagues who were in the same positions.
It also resulted in women having to wait longer for management promotions than men did. The lawsuit was composed of over 1.5 million women, including every woman employed by Wal-Mart anytime after December 26, 1998, which made this the largest class action lawsuit in American history. This statistic prompted Wal-Mart to argue that the court should require employees to file separate lawsuits since lawsuits of this size, which was formed under Rule 23 (b) of the federal civil procedure, ‘unmanageable and unduly costly. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Court supported the female employees by upholding the class certification three times, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously sided with Wal-Mart because it was decided that six women could not represent millions of other women around the nation. As stated by Justice Antonin Scalia, “Without some glue holding together the alleged reasons for those decisions, it will be impossible to say that examination of all the class members’ claims will produce a common answer to the crucial discrimination question.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer, defended the lawsuit by writing, “Whether the class the plaintiffs describe meets the specific requirements of Rule 23 (b)(3) is not before the Court, and I would reserve that matter for consideration and decision on remand.”
Gender norms and biases are ingrained prejudices in our society, which means gender discrimination in the workplace probably isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Nevertheless, there are a few steps that people and lawmakers can do to stagnate this discrimination. The first is by raising the minimum wage. Women are overrepresented in low-wage occupations and make up almost two-thirds of employees who receive the federal minimum wage. If the government raised the minimum wage, it would have a huge effect on narrowing the gender pay gap and would lift a lot of women out of poverty. A second step is for companies to increase pay transparency, moving away from the practice of employees not disclosing their salaries with one another. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, if companies were to adopt payment transparency, they would help narrow the gender wage gap by up to 30%.
On a more individual level, employees and their managers can improve payment transparency by having open and honest conversations with each other about employees’ compensation. The third step is to unionize the workplace. According to the Economic Policy Institute, women who work in unions earn an average of 94 cents to the dollar in comparison to their male colleagues. Meanwhile, women who don’t work in unions earn only 78 cents to the dollar. This is mainly due to the fact that unions tend to advocate for equitable payment practices. These unions also help female employees secure benefits such as paid leave and scheduling
accommodations.
According to the World Economic Forum, It will take over 100 years to close the global gender pay gap. However, even though it’s going to take a long time for men and women to receive equal salaries, there are still things that corporations and small businesses can do to ensure their female employees are being treated fairly. In order for companies to properly challenge the gender wage gap, it is going to take a lot more than simply paying women the same amount as their male coworkers. More women are entering the workforce and that means accommodating working parents both at home and in the workplace by implementing paid leave and childcare services. When companies fail to protect their employees, people tend to quit their jobs. When people quit their jobs, production slows down. When production slows down, the economy suffers. Protecting employees is also protecting everyone’s well-being.