Unfortunately, I was not able to attach my video to this post…
The gender wage gap has been a prominent issue in the U.S for quite some time. However, there is a fairly large misconception of the gender wage gap seen in the United States and other industrialized nations. The wage gap may be 80 cents on the dollar for women’s earnings compared to men’s earnings, but that doesn’t account for individual jobs. It is an average number, so this statistic can’t be applied for individual salaries. In this presentation, I aimed to highlight what the wage gap actually was, what some of the factors were, and what we could do as a society to fix it. The government could definitely enact laws that would enforce a publication of companies’ individual wage gaps to be released yearly. Alongside the proposal of solutions to the problem, I proposed that society should take a deeper look into what else causes the wage gap. Sex discrimination seems to be a large chunk of the wage gap, and it is wrong. Men often get paid more than women for completing the same tasks. It is 100% illegal. Companies get away with it by not enforming their female employees of everyone else’s salaries. By recording two acting skits and presenting a humorous video to the class, I was able to display how companies discriminate against women in the labor force, what women can do to retaliate, and what the government can do to lower the rates of discrimination seen in the working class. One issue I encountered in creating my presentation was trying to find the perfect blend of attention-grabbing humor and well-knitted facts. Research clearly shows that women are consistently mistreated in the world; we have seen it through the #metoo movement and other projects my classmates worked very hard on. I molded some of my research from the paper into the essay, and the presentation received positive feedback. All in all, I learned quite a bit from doing my research and presenting this creative remix. I learned that people from all different political, ethnic, and moral backgrounds share a common idea in the gender wage gap; it isn’t fair for people to be paid differently for completing the same tasks. Work experience and prior salary history should not be accounted for in the calculation of your salary, and neither should your gender. I also learned that the U.S has made massive improvements in the closing the discriminatory section of the wage gap, but I don’t personally believe it has been enough. We can do so much better as the country that stands for equality and freedom.