Earnings Gap

2 Pages 577 Words

Earnings Gap
Lester Thurow has presented the issue that women have failed to make more progress towards closing the earnings gap between women and men in his article, “Why Women are Paid Less than Men.” He begins the article with comparing the earnings of racial groups such as black men to white men, Hispanic women to white women, and black women to white women. He also gives statistics about the earnings of black men to black and Hispanic men to Hispanic women in order to show how minority earnings are increasing faster than women’s earnings. By emphasizing on race, he sidelines from the real issue at hand.
Thurow presents many causes as to why women are paid less than men, before he presents his own reason. He suggests to the audience that men are, “programmed,” economically, to provide for their families while women are “programmed,” to take care of their family’s needs. This statement is used to convince us that this cause is due to the “biological facts of life” (187). Thurow gives this assertion and also explains that it has no evidence.
The next topic that Thurow suggests is that discrimination is the cause for the difference in salaries between women and men. This cause was directed towards an audience of men due to statements like “your wife.” Thurow’s tone suggests sarcasm as he talks about this cause. He would not use a statement such as this if he were persuading an audience including women. Thurow also tries to persuade the audience that discrimination may be an issue. He wants readers to believe that for men to discriminate against women would be illogical because their household incomes would decrease by lowering their wives’ income. This argument is not valid unless husbands are the ones who decide women’ salaries.
Thurow talks about educational gaps between men and women. He dismisses this as a cause due to the fact that the educational gap between the two has been closed since World...