49 Years After Kennedy Signed The Equal Pay Act, Women Still Earn 77 Cents To A Man’s Dollar

[Amimnoch]

111. Reading through the replies, the focus is not fully in the root causes.

Much of the focus throughout the thread is focused on businesses, hiring practices, and promotion practices. While I've no doubt from the evidence given there's disparity in those areas, the root cause goes much deeper, and when you sit back and look at our culture as a whole new picture is observed.

Even the best HR hiring practices, goals, and policies will not help narrow these gaps as long as our culture continues to "train" men and women to be different from the earliest stages of childhood development.

Ever heard of Police officer and firefighter Barbie? Surprisingly it actually has existed. Never really sold, but it has existed. Even so, you could hardly tell that Police Officer Barbie was a police officer, as she looked like a model wearing a cute little pencil skirt, and matching blue stylish peasant blouse.

How about Home-making GI Joe? Really, just with the toys provided, before we even have a gender identity, the "proper roles" for genders are being instilled into the youth.

From our earliest years of development in our current culture.. Females and males are treated differently. Have a completely different range of toys. Are encouraged to play in ways that are "gender appropriate".

By adolescence that treatment disparity grows even greater with boys tending to get pushed towards competitive sports activities, and girls are encouraged through cultural subtleties to "play house". While with time, the availability of competitive sports has been made more accessibly to young females, it generally doesn't get NEAR the same community support as the counterpart male sports.

Until we, as a culture, stop training our children to be different in their youth, we won't see much more change with them as they reach adulthood.