Men and women have equal pay. Discuss - Essay Example

Recognising the biased nature of the wage situation, several attempts have been made on the part of the UK government and other equal-rights organisations to remove the inequality, but limited progress has been made until now. Rather, the situation persists despite the fact that laws have been passed to discourage this practice1. Theories for the existence and persistence of this problem are many. Some blame the lower level of education or other kind of training possessed by women; others to the willingness of women to accept initial wage offers.

Still others attribute the wage gap to problems in the labour market or to the alternate responsibilities of women as mothers or child-carers. Whatever the reason: occupational segregation, sex discrimination, or other; it is evident that even today the labour market is constructed in a way that allows women to be poorly paid for a job that they do as well as the men who work alongside them. One study describes wage discrimination as stemming from the “crowding [of] women into a limited range of occupations” (Walby and Olsen, 2002, p. 41). This is also known as occupational segregation.

Women have made great strides in the working world since their general entrance into the workforce, which occurred only recently. However, they still have much to do in order to be considered on the same level as men. In the British Virgin Islands, poverty “has been especially associated with female headed households because of the concentration of women in lower paying jobs” (Status of Women, 2005). This type of “crowding” is typical all over the United Kingdom. Women are forced into menial or low-skilled jobs, largely because many do not possess the education or skill to fill higher positions.

This is especially true of older women, who lived in a generation where women were much less likely to attain higher levels of education. As a result, women find themselves in general receiving less money than