Getting Even
Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--And What to Do About It
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Are you (or a woman you love) being cheated out of 33 percent of your earnings?
If you're a woman, over your working lifetime you will lose between $700,000 and $2 million -- simply because of your sex. Is that fair? No. Can it be stopped? Absolutely.
The wage gap is a steady drain on the daily lives of women and our families. Rarely do we step back and add up what's missing -- better medical treatment, child care, housing, food, or retirement savings that women could have afforded if they were paid as well as men.
Getting Even exposes the discrepancy between what women and men make -- and how it affects us all. It reveals that the wage gap is not going away on its own. And it explains how to close the wage gap -- and, finally, get women even.
In this intelligently argued and startling book, Evelyn Murphy, Ph.D., humanizes the numbers through real-life stories and a wealth of data that has never before been examined. She shows how the wage gap pinches the daily lives of families throughout the country, at every economic level and in every industry. And she explains why, even though women have more opportunities than their mothers did, the wage gap persists: The American workplace still harbors an astonishing amount of discrimination, including blatant as well as complex hidden barriers, unspoken assumptions, unexamined attitudes, and habitual ways of behaving.
But Murphy also brings good news: The wage gap can be closed. Having served as an economist, politician, public official, and corporate officer, she has a 360-degree view of the problem -- and of the solution.
In a book that will explode into public debate, Murphy issues the indictment, rouses us to action -- and tells us exactly how to get even.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act prohibited gender bias in the workplace, women are still earning almost 25% less than comparably employed men. For Murphy, the reason why is obvious: persistent unintentional, and sometimes even intentional, discrimination. "Today's conventional wisdom about what causes the gender wage gap ignores anything that happens behind employers' doors," Murphy, who has a doctorate in economics and is a former lieutenant governor of Minnesota, points out. To open those doors, she examined scores of recent lawsuits, which provided her with more than 200 pages worth of stories and statistics guaranteed to convince even the most satisfied working woman that on-the-job discrimination is "still with us, and it's not going away on its own." Murphy, with the help of Graff, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, analyzes five types of discrimination "blatant sex discrimination, sexual harassment, workplace sex segregation, everyday discrimination and discrimination against mothers" and calculates that, over a lifetime, each working woman loses between $700,000 and $2 million because of them that means less money for bills, homes, investments and retirement plans. As an antidote, the book's last third offers detailed case studies of MIT, Mitsubishi and the state of Minnesota, working sites that, under pressure, implemented large-scale changes to address inequities. Murphy gives readers the tools and the inspiration they'll need to tackle individual discrimination issues without necessarily going to court, but her goal is obviously larger than that. As the president of the WAGE Project, she aims to rile the public at large into action so that the wage gap can be closed, for good, in the next 10 years.
