She hit the nail on the head. If employers could hire two women for the cost of one man, they would do so in a heartbeat.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 mandated that employers could not pay unequal wages to men and women who perform jobs that require considerably “equal skill, effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions within the same establishment.”
In other words, the jobs do not need to have the same title, just have similar requirements and working conditions. After the Equal Pay Act was passed, women’s salary increased from 63 percent of a man’s salary back then to roughly 80 percent in modern history.
Today, described in a study completed by the American Associate of University Women, which was trying to prove the existence of an overwhelmingly large pay discrepancy, found that when you factor in relevant variables such as education, experience, performance, and seniority, the wage gap shrinks to only 7 percent.
There is a human capital theory that is based on the premise of “compensating wage differentials.” In other words, people who value and require flexibility in work hours or conditions will choose occupations that offer that type of flexibility. As a result, they exchange high-wage but low-flexibility work for low-wage but high-flexibility work.Women gravitate to these lower-wage jobs because they seek the benefits that the increased flexibility will give them while their children are still at home. The problem then is not that there is a gap between the women who have chosen a lower-waged job and the men who chose a higher-wage job but that women end up being punished for their choice.