Time To Close the Gender Wage Gap
Fifty years after the Equal Pay Act of 1963, U.S. women are still making 77 cents for every dollar a man takes home. This is largely due to the fact that women continue to occupy different, lower-paying jobs than men (an infographic at The Huffington Post shows how little the 10 leading occupations of women have shifted over the past half century). An article in the Review of Radical Political Economics digs deeper into the reasons why this occurs, and offers six potential solutions:
Unionizing women, comparable worth, pay secrecy legislation, affirmative action, stronger non-discrimination legislation, and family-friendly policies can improve the gender wage gap. But doing so means that instead of attempting to pass federal legislation, advocates should target states to pass legislation and undertake pro-active remedies that can improve women’s pay.
Read the article, “Policies to End the Gender Wage Gap in the United States,” published by Marlene Kim of the University of Massachusetts Boston in the RRPE September 2013 issue.
