Breaking down the gender wage gap
Mia Smith, Contributor |
The gender pay gap has been a hot topic of discussion for decades. Despite the persistence of the fight for equal pay for many long years, though, it still continues to be an issue all throughout the world.
What are the facts right now?
According to Statistics Canada, in 2022, women make 0.89 to what men make, which means that women are being paid 11 cents less compared to every dollar that men are making.
The gender wage gap in Canada even seeps through to those pursuing university degrees.
According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, as of 2019, women who graduate with a bachelor’s degree are on average making $69,063 annually while men with the same level of education are making $97,961 annually.
More men are employed full-time sitting at 87 per cent while the percentage of women working full-time sits at 76.6 per cent. According to a study done by Policy Options, There is a 57 per cent gender wage gap that affects Indigenous women. The disparity is 46 per cent for women with disabilities, 39 per cent for immigrant women, and 32 percent for women who identify as racialized.
How far have we come?
The most vigorous and intense rally’s for bridging the pay gap have been brought by women in the United States
One of the earliest rally’s to date was placed in the mid-1800s, when women’s right activists, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized a case in the newspaper The Revolution. Later on, a bill was proposed in the 1940s titled, “Prohibiting Discrimination in Pay on Account of Sex.”
The bill was never passed through congress.
In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy passed a bill labeled the Equal Pay Act. President Kennedy when passing the bill while speaking about the act said that paying women and men different wages was an, “unconscionable practice.”
At this time, it can be cited that women were only being paid roughly 60 per cent of what men made.
Although these are big strides, neither the U.S. nor Canada felt a huge impact.
The average salary for Canadian women working full-time in 1994 was 70 per cent of that of men, a statistic that has remained relatively stable throughout the years, according to The New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women.
Another factor of the wage gap is that because of women’s social conditioning to be polite, kind, and never ask for too much, women are less likely to negotiate their salaries, according to Harvard. This is one reason that the equal pay gap continues to persist. It is important that as women who will soon leave school to enter the workforce, we make use of opportunities to negotiate salary. In fighting our own individual fight, we fight as a community against unequal pay.