Critical Analysis of Contemporary Issues

Outline

Introduction to the issue

Gender difference and bias

Gender and wage gap

Women workforce

Gender inequality

Critical Analysis of Contemporary Issues

Introduction

The wage gap is a statistical indicator often used as an index of the status of women's earnings relative to men's. It is also used to compare the earnings of other races and ethnicities to those of white males, a group generally not subject to race- or sex-based discrimination. The wage gap is expressed as a percentage (e.g., in 2010, women earned 77.4% as much as men) and is calculated by dividing the median annual earnings for women by the median annual earnings for men (U.S. Census Bureau 2012).

Minority women fare the worst. African-American women earn just 69 cents to every dollar earned by white men, and for Hispanic women that figure drops to merely 59 cents per dollar. Asian women are the exception, earning 90 cents for every dollar earned by white men--a sum higher than women of all other races/ethnicities as well as African-American and Hispanic men.

Body

In the majority of U.S. metro areas, single, childless women in their 20s make more per dollar than their male peers. The numbers are staggering and, reading them, it's easy to see why when you Google gender inequality, the top page of hits are either sites with its definition or sites on global gender inequality in countries other than the U.S (Henslin 2007).

These numbers certainly represent progress for women in employment and education. But to take them as a sign that gender inequality is no longer present in the United States would be a dangerous mistake. To be fair, the Time article does have one paragraph that alludes to this. It states that some academics and women's rights advocates warn against declaring victory for women workers. It then cites two telling figures. ...