Equal Pay for Equal Work

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Donna Flavinney

PHI208: Ethics and Moral Reasoning

Instructor: Jarrod Brown

July 18, 2016

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Should the wage gap be considered a form of discrimination against women? Should men be paid more than women for the same job with the same set of duties and responsibilities? In 1963 President Kennedy wanted to eliminate wage discrimination between men and women and signed The Equal Pay Act. (Cho & Kramer, n.d., Introduction para.) According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, n.d.), The Equal Pay Act of 1963 states that

no employer having employees subject to any provisions of this section shall discriminate, within any establishment in which such employees are employed, between employees on the basis of sex by paying wages to employees in such establishment at a rate less than the rate at which he pays wages to employees of the opposite sex in such establishment for equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions.

By this I think that the Equal Pay Act of 1963, means that men and women do not necessarily have to have to same job title, but their duties and responsibilities have to be the same. In my opinion, employers who continue to pay their female employees less than their male employees for the same job are breaking the law, and should be prosecuted for it. The United States Department of Labor (DOL) (2010) states that women made up forty-seven percent of the labor force that year. In 2015 that percentage grew to fifty-seven percent, however, the DOL is expecting the average to have a small drop in the number of women in the workforce by 2024 to fifty-six percent. Employers may imply that their female employees are paid less than their male employees for various reasons including working less hours than men in a given year, women tend to have to take off more time from work for...