Many statistics prove that in America there is a gap between the salaries of men and women. It seems that men make more in general. This trend is followed even in professions dominated by women, such as nursing.
Many female workers make 80 cents to the male dollar, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The reasons for this difference in salary, reports the Independent Women’s Forum, is that men are more likely to do high-risk jobs. It’s more common to find men working as firefighters, police officers, loggers and miners, while women dominate jobs with less risk, such as secretaries, teachers and nurses.
The Independent Women’s Forum says that women are more likely than men to consider their family a factor when choosing a job. This can have an impact on the likelihood of women obtaining certain jobs or moving up to better jobs. Finally, women are more likely to work part-time than men are.
According to the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, only 5.4 percent of registered nurses are men. Yet many male nurses manage to earn a higher salary. Marva Wheatley, a registered nurse who’s worked at various hospitals, explains, “One reason they get more is that men tend to be hired in managerial positions.”
U.S. law, however, protects women against discrimination in the workplace. Unequal pay based on one’s sex is illegal in the United States. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits sex-based wage discrimination between men and women in the same establishment.” Additionally, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, sex and national origin.”
The gap between men’s and women’s wages is tightening, according to the New York Times. In America’s large cities, with New York City at the forefront, women have recently begun to earn the same as, or more than, their male counterparts. Young, single women without families to care for in larger cities such as New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston are increasingly focusing on college, graduate school and their careers. As a result, they are leveling or even turning around today’s gender gap in salaries.
When I asked Ethel Paden, a registered nurse for 20 years at a hospital in the greater-Newark area, if she ever witnessed pay discrimination based on gender, she responded: “Not at all. It’s based more on experience than gender.” If male nurses did get more pay for the same job, she explained, it would probably be to attract males into the profession, which has always been dominated by females. “A man might look at it and say ‘that’s a woman’s job,’ but males can be useful in certain departments, such as psychiatrics when patients can become unruly and need to be sedated.”
“In my opinion,” Paden says, “it’s the women who work harder, but the men who see the better checks.”
Mario McCalla is a journalism major at Rutgers-Newark. Posted September 2008.
