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Equal Pay & the Wage Gap

Website:

Equal Pay and the Wage Gap

https://nwlc.org/issue/equal-pay-and-the-wage-gap/

When it comes to equal pay, it can be a hard thing to measure because of the diverse set of backgrounds, education, and experience a candidate can have. That’s in addition to things like the location of where you work, and the living standard, and just plain old human decision making can adversely impact how much money a person earns. That’s why it’s important to look at studies that adjust for those things to ensure that the information is accurate. 

It’s these types of studies that tell us that women who work full time, make about 80 cents for every dollar that a man makes, and that when it comes to colored women, the gap is even larger still. The Equal Pay and the Wage Gap website holds a plethora of information, including laws that regarding equal pay, information regarding how the gap is measured, and ways that the gap can be eliminated.

Although each of the readings and videos were primarily focused on different groups of people and their specific experiences, an overarching theme of discrimination easily emerged. While we focused primarily on race, whether it be Native American, African American, Chinese or Mexican, each of the stories focused on how they were being treated, primarily by whites, when all they really were asking for was a chance at a fair shake. All three of the migrations that were discussed revolved around the idea that they were, in some cases, leaving their family in for the siren call of a higher wage and what they entailed. It’s in this vein that I see the similarities between the fight of women to earn a fair wage, and the discrimination that these other groups endured. In kind of a sick twist, minority women continue to fight harder to close the wage gap.

Just shy of a 100 years ago, women fought and won the right to vote as a result of the Women’s Suffrage movement, yet here they are still fighting for equality because they ended up with the “wrong” set of chromosomes. One of the most interesting aspects of this wage gap is that studies have found, regardless of sex, wage is at least somewhat dictated by a person’s previous pay and it’s in this way that the resulting gap in page can really be felt. A 20 cent, on average, difference in pay doesn’t seem that great and can be relatively easily explained away by discussing experience, number of women in the workforce, education, etc. But taking into account the compounding nature of earnings over a lifetime, and how past wages influence future wages, the fight for equal pay for equal work isn’t all that different than the minority migrations of the past. The obvious exception being instead of focusing on one group or skin color, it affects around fifty percent of the US population and there is no place for women to migrate to in an effort to escape and better their situation.

[kjlamont]

Hidden Figures

Film:

Hidden Figures (2016)

Director: Thodore Melfi

Production Companies: Fox 2000 Pictures, Chernin Entertainment, Levantine Films, TSG Entertainment

Distributors: 20th Century Fox

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe

Hidden Figures is a movie that takes place in the early 1960’s during the space race. While the country was trying desperately to catch up with the soviets and put men into space, following Yuri Gagarin’s successful trip, the movie follows a group of black women who work at NASA fighting their own fight. At a time when the supreme court Brown vs Board of Ed decision paved the way to desegregate schools, there was still plenty of segregation outside of schools. Hidden Figures follows the main characters Kathrine Goble, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan as they fight to advance their careers, be taken seriously, and struggle with the effects of discrimination that results from the color of their skin.

The fight for these characters to earn a living wage, better their situation and provide a better life for their families and future generations strongly correlates with the readings we had regarding the Northern Migration, The Search for Gold Mountain, and El Norte. While these women weren’t slaves living in squalor or being barricaded to force them back to work, they were met with a lot of the same assumptions both because they were black and because they were women. This meant carving out their niche within the company was, essentially, twice as difficult as they were fighting both racism and sexism. The movie did a wonderful job of showing how this was not just a single department or aberration by focusing on the different career paths that each of the characters were traveling and the specific challenges that they each faced.

One of the most poignant examples of how racism was still very much a problem was in the challenges that Katherine, who was the first black person assigned as a human computer on the Space Task Group, faced when simply trying to do her job. Not because of the dismissiveness of both her supervisor and colleagues who doubted she had the “mathematically ability” to do the job, but because she had to travel a half mile to reach the closest color bathroom, in another building. It doesn’t take someone with a strong imagination to see how something like that would set a person up for failure by making it nearly impossible to complete their daily tasks. This culminated in the head of the task force destroying the “colored only” bathroom sign in the building allowing her to focus on her work.

For someone like myself who’s primarily experienced segregation through history books, it really gives you insight into some of what it must have been like for someone of color to try to make it in a society that was very much stacked against them. Something as basic as using the bathroom really became a microcosm of the struggles that they were faced with. 

[kjlamont]

Modern Family

TV:

Modern Family (2009 - )

Creators: Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd

Starring: Ed O'Neill, Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen

Modern Family is a television show about a diverse family and how they not only navigate life, but how they get along together. It’s filmed in a “documentary style”, allowing for many “4th wall” breaks where the characters talk directly to the audience. It features a traditional married couple with 3 kids of varying intelligence and skills, a gay couple with an adopted baby of Asian descent, and the Patriarch who is married to his second wife, a much younger Latino woman, who has a child from a previous marriage. Many of our course readings pointed out how perception plays a key role, both in how people are treated through “typical” characteristics and assumptions based on how they look.

Given the diverse set of groups that are represented in the show, they tackle a lot of stereotypes in comedic ways but without lessening their importance. It a lot of ways it reminds me of a more polished version of both the “Couple in a Cage” and “Confessions” video’s and articles that we read. While the artivisim was intended to utilize more shock value to get people talking and to pay attention, Modern Family tends to use humor to tackle sensitive situations. Like all sitcoms, a lot of conflict could be realistically resolved simply by discussing things, but they get people talking by utilizing the chaos and confusion resulting from those misunderstandings. In addition, they utilize the “interview” with the documentary producers to both help resolve conflict and explain some where some of the confusion resulted from.

One of the over-arching “issues” results from the Patriarch, Jay, and his lack of emotional availability when it comes to his kids Clair and Mitchell. Mitchell playing a more typical gay man role, struggles with this in part because he didn’t feel as though he got the support and understanding he needed after coming out. This contrasts sharply with Clair who is a very strong personality and is viewed as the person who runs her family and keeps everyone in line. This drive to gain her father’s approval eventually led to her taking over the family business. However, as a female CEO running a company her father founded she has to work extra hard to prove her worth.

The way in which the writers of Modern Family approach these issues appears to be very analogous to how the artivists crowds responded when being presented with overtly stereotypical images and costumes of people who appeared different than them. Likely emboldened, in part, by the anonymity that crowds lead people to believe they have, people were willing to fight and/or verbally attack people because they didn’t appear to hold the same values as they do.