Are Men and Women Equal in Work Pay

Educational and wages gaps between women and men are narrowing. They have steadily declined from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. Since 1995, catch-up has continued, but at a slower pace. According to this trend, it would take several decades to achieve equal pay for women and men. In the 1950s, women on a full-time basis received an average of two-thirds of men's wages. In 1998, they crossed the threshold of 80%. The catch-up was particularly rapid between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s.

Since then, it has continued at a slower pace. Women have nibbled just three points over the past fifteen years, reaching 83.5% of men's pay level in 2015.

There are two main reasons for catching up. Discrimination purely related to sex (difficult to measure) has probably decreased: the generalization of women's paid work has trivialized their employment, at least in certain sectors (law, medicine and communication for example). Above all, the schooling of girls has significantly raised the level of qualification of women in the labor market.

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The places of men and women at work have rebalanced. The most widespread inequality in the field of education is that between women and men. In 1990, in the world, the enrollment rate in primary education in the age of 6 to 11 years was 74.6% of girls and 88.3% of boys. In developed countries these rates respectively were 91.8% and 92.2%; in developing countries, 71.3% and 81.5%; in Africa, 52.4% and 61.5%. The imbalance is even more pronounced at the secondary level, where rates for the whole world were 48.3% for girls and 57.3 for boys.

This discrimination imposes a heavy letter to adult women. In 47 countries, in 1992, women over 25 had had an average of less than two years of schooling. This low educational level was only found for men in 21 countries. In 42 countries, the education of women was half less than that of men.

What has happened since 1995 to make catching up slow, while women are now more educated than men? Women seem to be confronted with a 'glass ceiling' that prevents them from achieving full pay equity. Many of the jobs they occupy are in the service sector, where there is little skill, where wages are low: mass distribution, personal services, and so on. At the same time, many positions of responsibility, the best paid, remain closed to them. Finally, a part of women seems to refuse the competition to which they should engage in order to obtain equal pay in a highly hierarchical labor market.

Have men taken their feet from women’s necks TODAY allowing women to stand upright “on that ground which God designated [women] to occupy’? Yes, still, there is an inequality among men and women. The problem of the differences between men and women is still very much rooted in our society. A phenomenon that manifests itself on many levels as in the school path.

The current structure of employment with modern gender differences in the level of education indicates that, due to stereotypes, the most educated part of the country's labor force has the worst parameters of quality of employment and, therefore, is used inefficiently. Secondly, the upcoming increase in the payment of education in US inevitably leads to the conclusion that it is necessary to develop a system of student loans (state and / or supported by the state, i.e., provided or repaid on concessional terms) to pay students for their education and / or accommodation. Leaving outside the scope of this article such an important question of introducing educational loans as their actual accessibility (if educational loans will not suffer the fate of a mortgage), let us dwell on the gender aspect of the problem, or rather, on the gender problems of the return of educational loans.

To conclude, the fact is that for boys and girls who receive education at their own expense, only the tuition fee will be the same (although it will be differentiated depending on the institution, its location, the name of the specialty for which the training is conducted) and, consequently, the size educational loan. But the possibilities for repayment of this loan for men and women will be different.

First, because of differences in their positions in paid employment (high level of horizontal and vertical segregation, prevalence of direct and indirect discrimination in hiring, job promotion, etc.), the average wage of women today is only 64% of the average wage. men fees. Secondly, because of interruptions in women's professional career.