Much has been written about pay differential between male and female employees in workplaces across California and the rest of the country.
And much more will indeed be written.
Equal pay for similar work is obviously a subject that hits hard and importantly for virtually all workers in the United States. Unless a person is without empathy or for some singular reason simply doesn’t care much about pay (an uncommon mindset, to be sure), a discrepancy in wages based upon gender lines for two people doing substantially the same work must reasonably come across as arbitrary and patently unfair.
Bloomberg recently joined the ongoing and deeply meaningful discussion focused upon gender-based pay inequality in an article penned by a writer that thoughtfully spotlights some theories as to why women workers are often shorted in their pay checks compared with male employees.
The piece notes that, interestingly (and based upon research conducted by economists from the New York Federal Reserve), men and women often start out working at about the same level of pay, at least among college graduates.
That essentially fair playing field often doesn’t remain an immutable feature for many female workers, though, as they enter mid-career. Researchers note that children often enter the picture at this stage, with female employees taking time off to care for them far more often than do their male workplace counterparts.
That has downside implications for wages, with Reserve economists stating that, by mid-career, “males earn a more substantial premium in nearly every [college] major.”
Another factor pointed to that is a bit more tenuous and murky is what researchers believe might be an increased propensity in the corporate world for women to be increasingly discriminated against as they age.
Whatever the reasons are for gender-based wage bias, they produce unfair results.
Workplace discrimination-related questions or concerns (whether based on gender, race, age, religion, disability or any other grounds) can be directed to an experienced employment law attorney.