This paper examines the status of women in the American workforce over several decades, tracing efforts to protect women in the workplace from early minimum wage legislation in the 1920s through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It analyzes labor force participation rates, occupational segregation, and the persistent gender wage gap — which stood at 77 cents to every dollar a man earned — while exploring the structural and attitudinal barriers that prevent women from advancing. The paper also evaluates common arguments used to justify the wage disparity and assesses the progress made against continuing discrimination and stereotyping in hiring, promotion, and pay practices.
Over the last four decades, women have entered the workforce in greater numbers than ever before. At the same time, they have pressed for equality with men in terms of level of achievement, promotions, and pay, generally lagging behind because of discriminatory payment practices and a so-called "glass ceiling" that prevents them from advancing as far as they might. The central question is: how far have women come, and do current statistics on the employment of women show genuine progress?
Efforts to protect women in the workplace extend back at least as far as the 1920s. Minimum wage laws covering women and children were enacted in fifteen states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico between 1912 and 1923. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Adkins v. Children's Hospital that the District of Columbia's minimum wage law violated the right of contract under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Little data exists to allow for an analysis of the effects of these first minimum wage laws. There are reports that these laws raised the wages of women in particular. However, as Clifford F. Thies writes, "the actual experience with these laws is that, to the extent they raised women's wages, they forced offsetting increases in the productivity of low-wage women, or else they lowered women's employment. That is, these laws restricted the choices available to less productive women and their employers, removing the option of low-wage work" (Thies, 1991, p. 715).
Women have long been given secondary status in the workplace, with lower pay being one of the most visible signs of this. The pay disparity that exists between men and women has a historical basis rather than a rational one. Women entered the workforce only slowly throughout history and were directed into lower-paying and dead-end jobs for most of that time. Women were at one time denied the education they would need to qualify for better-paying occupations. In addition, women were seen as not needing employment as much as men did. Women were expected to marry and to be supported by their husbands. Women's "proper" work was in the home, and work in the home was unpaid. Whether true or not, women who worked outside the home were seen as seeking additional income for the family or as indulging a hobby, and in either case they could be paid less because they were not considered the primary breadwinner.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there were 116 million women in the United States, of whom 68 million were in the labor force either working or looking for work. The participation rate stood at 59.2 percent, meaning women represented 46 percent of the total U.S. labor force. There were differences in participation according to race: 61.5 percent of Black women, 58.9 percent of white women, 57.6 percent of Asian women, and 56.1 percent of Hispanic women participated in the labor force. Projections indicated that women in 2012 would make up approximately the same share of the workforce as they did in 2003. Higher levels of education correlate with greater likelihood of being in the labor force, and higher educational attainment also correlates with lower unemployment rates. Of the women who worked, 38 percent were employed in management, professional, and related occupations, while 35 percent worked in sales and office occupations (Statistics & Data, 2005).
One of the persistent complaints about women in the workplace is that they are not advanced in their careers as men are. Recent statistics suggest this remains the case. Managers are twice as likely to be men than women. The course of careers differs in several notable ways:
About a quarter of female employees do administrative or secretarial work. Men are twice as likely as women to be managers and senior officials, and far more likely to be in skilled trades. Similar proportions of men and women work in "associate professional and technical" occupations, such as computer programmers, technicians, and nurses (Working lives, 2004).
"Wage disparity data and justifications examined"
"Promotion barriers and workplace stereotyping"
Women are entering the workforce in greater numbers and are finding opportunities that did not exist a few years ago, but overall the disparities still exist so that women still make less money than men, still cannot advance as far, and are still subject to discrimination and to presumptuous attitudes about why they work, whether they will stay on the job or leave after marriage, and whether they are as capable as men doing the same job. Laws can be passed to increase the number of women hired and to offer some protections on the job, but eliminating deeply entrenched harmful attitudes can be much more difficult.
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