The Gender Pay Gap

812 Words4 Pages
“The Vicious Cycle of the Gender Pay Gap” is an article from the TimeBusiness website that examines the gender pay gap among male and female stockbrokers. The gender pay gap has been used as a method to discreetly enforce the societal “glass ceiling” as it pertains to the workplace. Janice Fanning Madden, who happens to teach sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, witnessed for herself the effects of an evident pay gap within the workplace, and studied the factors that caused and reinforced the pay gap between the two genders. While studying the class action suits of women against the two large brokerage firms that they worked for, Madden noticed that all of the women claimed that the companies were structured to benefit men in regards to the paying scale. The companies stuck to their claims that both genders were being assessed an paid using the same commission based system, and that the women were usually being paid less than the average male broker because of their “underperformance”. Madden’s investigation actually found that the women employed at these brokerage firms were assigned (by the most upper staff who were largely male) to inferior and less lucrative accounts, which resulted in smaller returned earnings and commission. Brokers who have smaller returns are not offered the various amenities, such as bigger offices or a support staff, that could be necessary to attract the biggest accounts and grow within the company. Thus, this created a cycle in which female brokers were rarely given an opportunity to work with the biggest accounts that would earn them larger returns for their companies. In regards to the gender pay gap in which women’s earning are typically much less than the earnings of their male counterparts, the two social theories that are best linked to the issue are functionalism and the feminist theory. In a functionalist
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