¶ … contrary, indications of a definite gender pay gap seem to persist. Wanzenreids (2008), for instance, conducted a large-scale study of 108,628 observations on 26,047 executives and 2,598 firms, between the years 1992 to 2003, and showed that women are working for smaller, less profitable firms than men and that female executives earn 14% less than their male colleagues. More so, the gender pay gap is higher towards the upper end of the pay distribution. As recently as 2002, women who worked more than thirty-five hours per week for fifty-two weeks per year earned only 78% as much as men (Giddens, Duneir, & Applebaum, 2003). Most sociologists (e.g. Alksnis, Desmarais, & Curtis, 2008) seem to think that sexism is the determining factor for the differnce in gender wage, but it may just be that other, less innocuous, reasons may explain the disparity.

These include (1) self-selection by women into female-dominated industries, which pay less (2) self-selection by women out of the workforce periodically (e.g., to raise children), which fragments their work history and thereby reduces their income potential and (3) men's internalized status beliefs that makes them more likely to feel worthy of higher pay. Men, more assertive than women, are able to demand, and receive, the higher wages.

Wage Gap

As recently as 2002, it was discovered that women who worked full time year round (i.e. more than thirty-five hours per week for fifty-two-week...

Media and sociologists generally attribute the wage gap to gender typing and gender discrimination. Evidence seems to bear out these assumptions. England (1992), for instance, remarks that even: "after adjusting for cognitive, social, and physical skill demands, amenities, demands for effort, and industrial and organization characteristics, jobs pay less if they contain a higher proportion of females."
Sex segregation also seems to play a part. Men and women are clustered into different occupations, which, although sometimes seemingly similar, pay highly disparate wages, with the male inevitably receiving the higher wage. A male garbage collector for instance is generally paid 3 times as much as a female nurse.

Although the Equal Pay Act was established in 1963, pay differences between genders persist. The problem is that the Equal Pay Act requires employers to provide equal pay to workers in the same job, but men and women often do not work at the same jobs explaining reason for the large wage gap. Nonetheless, studies show that even when men and women are in the same job, men are still paid more (Giddens et al., 2003).

The size of the gap has definitely diminished over time, but the female-male difference continues to be substantial for full-time, year round workers in America. Whist the gap persists in almost all fields, there does seem to be a lessening of the wage gap in certain fields such as…