Equal Pay :: essays research papers

Mike K.Essay on equal pay in the work place.In 1963, President Kennedy signed the cost fabricate Act into law, making it unlawful to discriminate against a worker on the basis of sex. Since that time, the wage gap between men and women in the linked States has narrowed by just 15 cents, now being 74 cents, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.Pay equality is most commonplace for the 16 to 24 age group, in which women earn more than 90 percent of what men do however, the gap becomes 75 percent in the 25 to 54 year old group those at the height of their careers and life responsibilities. A number of factors have contributed to the gap between mens and womens wages. These include occupational segregation of women into low paying hypothesizes lower levels of unionization for women and attitudinal barriers that have kept women from achieving equality in the oeuvre and undervaluation for womens work. The Equal Pay Act (part of the Fair Labor Standards Act), forbids employers to co mpensate women differently for jobs that are substanti bothy equal, that is, almost identical. Traditionally, women have worked in different occupations than men these occupations tend to be substantially different, pay less and confer less authority. Equity means fairness and justice. Pay equity programs throughout the world attempt to legislate and shape the elimination of systemic gender-based wage discrimination and to ensure ongoing systems that will maintain equitable wage relationships over time.Pay equity programs attempt to report the undervaluation for work traditionally or historically done by women. Pay equity (also referred to as comparable worth) programs require a gender-neutral analysis of relative work. A variety of very different jobs are compared based on a composite of the skill, effort and responsibility of a job and the conditions under which the job is generally done. The comparison determines the relative worth of those jobs to the achievement of a firms o bjectives, under the proposition that equal contribution merits equal compensation. Where female-dominated jobs in the workplace are found to be of equal or comparable value to male-dominated jobs but paid below the level of the male jobs or payline, then all employees in those female-dominated jobs are entitled to receive pay equity adjustments. But how are these adjustments to be determined in a workplace that already subjectively undervalues the effort and contribution of women and minorities?