For this MDG action project I had write a letter to a senator, about gender inequality. I wrote about general jobs of men and women wage gaps. The most challenging part was finding a country with better wage gaps to compare. The thing I liked the most was learning how many women aren't paid the way they should be. The purpose of this was to show how women are still not treated the way men are, everywhere.
3 October, 2013
Sen. Al Franken
P.O. Box 583144
Minneapolis, MN 55458-3144
Dear Senator Franken,
Hello, my name is NVA, and I am a student at Global Citizenship Experience (GCE) High School in Chicago. I have a class called MDGs & You, and we study the Millennium Development Goals - the United Nations’ targets for addressing the greatest challenges to humanity. We are learning about gender inequality in the U.S. and how women are treated as second class citizens. I am writing to you, because you deal with people's’ jobs and how they are dealt with, and this a huge thing that I as a U.S. citizen is not being taken care of correctly.
I chose to write about women’s salaries in everyday jobs. Women in the United States today are not treated the way they should be in their work places, on TV, or even in general. In a city, women have jobs everywhere and they might even have the same education, experience, and skills as men but they don’t get the same salary! Today women, on average, earn 35%-45% less than male workers in the same jobs. On average, the weekly median salary for women workers is $648 while the men’s is $832. Our nation’s history shows this has been going for years and the government has not done enough to help women. We need to do more for women and give them the pay they have earned.
To see how unjust our nation’s practices are, I compared these U.S. statistics to another country’s so we might learn how we can reduce the wage gaps in the United States. In Australia, gender wage gaps are only 14.5-17%. Australians show their belief in progress toward equality in their actions. It said on the website, “women were awarded the same rate of pay as men - no matter what work they were doing, as long as it was assessed as comparable in value.” For some jobs in Australia, women get higher pay than men do, depending how good they are. In some areas the gap is only 5.9-4.9%.I am aiming at the generally jobs that women and men get, like labor or teacher. I want us to look at them and not copy their system, but I think that we should at least take some thoughts into mind from what they have done.
In conclusion, our government needs to take charge and realize that women aren't being respectfully paid or treated. We need to look at Australia to see some of the ways, one way they actually lower the wage gap is by commonly hiring a women that is smarter and more useful in the workforce. Another way they have successfully worked on this target was by passing many Acts that say women must have equal pay if they show as good work as the do men.
Thank You,
NVA
REFERENCES
“ Gender Pay Gap Statistic “ Australian Government, Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Feb, 2013.
“ Male-Female Income Disparity in the US “ n.p., Wikipedia, 30 August, 2013.
“ Gender Pay Gap in Australia “ n.p., Wikipedia, 4 September, 2013.
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