Gender Discrimination in the Workplace and Ways to Reduce Wage Gap

Gender discrimination continues to persist in the workplace today, as evidenced by the 2021 median weekly earning of U.S. women amounting to 83.14% of mens wages. This paper proposes and analyzes three strategies to address the gender bias and mitigate the wage gap in sexes: pay transparency, unconscious bias training, and fair salary determinants. Pay transparency can effectively highlight wage disparities and indirectly avoid wage gaps, but it does not directly offer a solution. Unconscious bias trainings are capable of raising awareness, though it may unintentionally reinforce certain stereotypes or provoke defensiveness. While pay transparency and unconscious bias trainings can establish short-term benefits, their limitations undermine their efficacy in the long term. Initializing fair salary determinants, the most sustainable solution, will be able to mitigate biases by evaluate employees based on objective criteria, including skill, effort, and responsibility, as suggested in the Equal Pay Act. By emphasizing the objectiveness in the workplace, impartial evaluations and transparent policies will form a fair work environment, especially for female workers to gain equal opportunities and fair compensation. Hence, this paper advocates for a most effective and plausible approach in establishing fair compensation and reduces workplace disparities.