Gender Inequality Essay

We’d all like to believe that we are equals within our society, but democracy doesn’t necessarily ensure equality. We all must work for a living, and the constitution would have you believe that racial minorities and women would have equal opportunities and equal wages as white men. But this is not the case. For many years people, mainly girls and women, have fought to equalize genders with some success, specifically in the work force. Gender inequality is not only a historic issue but one that still exists today in the form of the gendered pay gap. Gender inequality in the workforce is not only a current civil rights issue but one that spans back through our history as a nation. Rooted as far back as the 1800s when the Cult of Domesticity

Ledbetter started working for Goodyear Tire Co. in 1979; she had been working there for about twenty years and there was no job she could not do. In 1998 she received an anonymous tip saying that she was being paid much less than the male worker. She was being paid $44,700 a year while the male workers were getting paid twenty-five percent more (Reah, 2008). Goodyear prohibited its employees from discussing their pay. Ledbetter took the situation to court. The discrimination was violating Title VII which prohibits discrimination in the workforce based on race and sex (NWLC, 2013). After she filed a complaint with the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), her case went to trial, and the jury awarded her backpay and approximately $3.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages for the extreme nature of the pay discrimination to which she had been subjected (NWLC, 2013). Goodyear claimed “Ledbetter had to had filed a pay discrimination claim within 180 days of first discriminatory paycheck even though she did not know about the discrimination” (Reah, 2008); the Supreme Court agreed with Goodyear’s claim and ruled against