The Journal of Economic Behavior Organization published a study that looked at the income of heterosexual couples between the ages of 18 and 65 over a four-decade period. According to the data examined by Professor Hema Swaminathan and Professor Deepak, men continue to be paid more than women in every country.
Out of the 45 countries examined, researchers were unable to determine a specific nation where women earned more than men.
Professor Swaminathan said, “The general assumption is that, within a household, incomes tend to be pooled and equally distributed. But the household is often a place of great inequality and we wanted to unpack that.”
According to the study, pay inequalities between men and women persist throughout timeーin both rich and poor homes around the world. Even when both partners were employed, the results revealed that there isn’t a single country where wives earn as much as their husbands.
Although women’s involvement in the labor market has increased over the last 40 years, the researchers believe that businesses and governments are not doing enough to eliminate the wage gap between men and women.
Professor Swaminathan stated, “Companies are not recruiting enough women who are penalized for doing unpaid care work and housework.” The academic continued, “So we have to ask: is women’s work being acknowledged? Are there family-friendly and child-friendly policies? We also need better brought up men who will share the burden of the unpaid chores.”
“There’s a lot that governments and societies can do,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Swaminathan stated further.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, women’s workforce participation has increased drastically. Women have been working longer hours and enrolling in college in greater numbers since the women’s rights movement, which included women’s suffrage and breakthroughs in equal opportunity in the workplace and education. Despite these advances, men and women still have significant income disparities. For example, according to the Census Bureau, more males hold full-time jobs than women, and as a result, they may work longer hours, resulting in higher earnings. However, the sudden surge of 1.4 million female full-time workers from 2000 to 2018 partially counters this claim. Despite the fact that there are more full-time female workers, women get paid 82 cents for every dollar earned by males.
Gender wage discrimination has been outlawed in the United States since 1963, yet it’s still a common practice. Women still earn 83 cents for every dollar earned by men despite working full-time in the United States. The ramifications of said pay disparity affect women throughout their whole lives.
Discriminatory wages have an economic impact on everyone. Ending the wage gap between men and women will involve efforts from a variety of sources, including politics, culture, businesses, and citizens. We can hopefully remove the wage gap and create an economic system that benefits everyone, regardless of gender or ethnicity, if we all work together and form an alliance.
In the fight for equality, we’ve come a long way, and we can improve our society even more if this gap is eliminated from our policies.