A Tally of the Money I Didn’t Make Because of My Gender
Looking at the gender wage gap in action
Recently, feminist author Chidera Eggerue made waves by telling a woman to dump her broke medical student boyfriend and stop “splitting the bill.” She said,
In a world where for every dollar… [a man makes], I make 79 cents, it doesn’t make any sense for me to go and be pouring water into the ocean, going halves on bills.
I have mixed feelings about her argument, though her point about the wage gap is something I don’t take lightly. I’ve struggled with this my entire life.
People hear these statistics a lot (the 79 cents for every dollar a man makes) and there’s something about them that feels intangible. Like…what does that really mean? Sure, it means our overall salary is less than a man’s, but when we also see headlines like “More women are outearning their husbands than ever — but we aren’t willing to talk about it,” it creates a lot of confusion about an issue that already feels difficult to illustrate.
What does the gender pay gap really look like?
Gender Roles & Money
The wheels of gender equality move very slowly. Even as we see an increase in women out-earning male spouses, it doesn’t change the sexist gender…
