Why do women earn less than men?

According to a Guardian article on Wednesday, women graduates earn on average £1,000 less than male graduates and go into lower paid and skilled positions than men generally in the work place.


Don't we already know this? the survey may be based on new figures but it's a reaction against yet another cultural myth prevailing in society, that women and men have equal access to the work sphere.

In actual fact, despite an equal pay act, women do earn less than men on average, and in equivalent jobs. The well used argument that women gendered jobs are just generally lower paid (childcare, nursing) may well have truth to it, but does not account for the fact that women with equal qualifications and working in equal job roles still get paid less than men.

To blame is partly the fact that employees are not aware of this cultural bias, but the people in charge of the pay roles most definitely are so when are we going to do something about it?

As a culture we are fooled by a few mainstream representations of the cold hearted man hating, post feminist woman, who climbs easily up the career chain using both her brains and beauty to beat men into positions that 50 years ago would be unimaginable. This myth is solely based on the high profiles of a few really successful career women and fueled by the post feminist representation of characters such those in Sex and the City. But in reality it is much harder than that.

Women have to work twice as hard as men to get to equivalent positions, there success is subject to all kinds of pitfalls and conditions, women have to look good, be 'feminine' yet still display 'man like' qualities such as rationality and ruthlessness in the work place and they have to put up with the constant assumption that at any minute they are going to get pregnant and therefore take maternity leave and 'naturally' want to stay at home and raise the baby.

Until we as a society realise what is going on and women force the issue out into the open we are going to continue to suffer this ridiculous inequality.It's not only gender either, all sorts of prejudices still exist in the work place and society in general depending on your age, race and sexual orientation but because of the smoke screen that is post feminism, it is now considered ridiculous to claim that women don't have the same basic rights as men. The woman who claims this is considered a fool and laughed at.

What staggers me is that women are not a minority, we are the majority, so why do we not put more pressure on bosses to pay us what we deserve? The same pay as men based on skills, knowledge and experience, not gender