Although I was aware of gender disparity in the workplace, I was shocked to see the exact figures of the wage gap between male and female Ivy League graduates in a recent article by the Huffington Post. Even Ivy League graduates experience a wage gap of upwards of $50,000 per year. Just because women are subjected to better working conditions than ten years ago does not mean we have established a system in which women and men are treated equal. This article showed that even women that are deemed to be the most educated in our society are not able to contend for the same pay as men.
The first identifiable cause for the massive pay gap between men and women is how jobs are labelled in society. People subconsciously relate jobs with genders, through exposure that is hard to discern consciously. I remember perceiving in elementary school, although there was no logical reasoning behind it, certain jobs as “girl jobs,” such as teachers, and others as “boy jobs,” such as bankers. Humanities and social sciences are deemed feminine, and STEM subjects and hard sciences are deemed masculine. According to the article, a majority of women choose to major in humanities or social sciences, losing the opportunity to have higher paying jobs in the STEM industry because of this preconception. Even within students of the same major, “women often end up taking less lucrative jobs after school.”
It was relieving to read that universities have identified these problems, and are working to encourage women to major in STEM subjects. I consider myself lucky to be attending a school that enables students to explore a variety of interests, and is investing in a state-of-the-art STEM facilities. But I also know that a lot of people are not as lucky as I am. I hope by the time I have my own job, the landscape of the working world looks drastically different from what it looks like now for both my generation and for future generations to come.
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