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Essay on Employment Discrimination Relating to Women
The economic cost of being female is that women, on average, earn less than men do. To be precise, that part of the gender pay gap that cannot be explained by relevant factors is the economic COBF. A large part of the difference is due to discrimination against women in the labor market and in the workplace. Labor market discrimination occurs when an individual's employment or pay is based on arbitrary factors irrelevant to job performance.
Two forms of discrimination should be distinguished: Statistical discrimination, like prejudice, is judging an individual on the basis of the average characteristics of the group to which the individual belongs. An employer refuses to train a woman worker because, on average, women workers drop out of the labor force to have children, and thus the employer will not get a return on his investment. But many women today do not have children, and thus are being discriminated against statistically.
Taste discrimination occurs when members of one group simply do not like members of another group. Employers may not like women and will refuse to hire them unless they can pay them less. Employers can save money by underemploying women, that is, by not promoting them. The other employees may not like to have women around and certainly not as supervisors; so they may demand a wage premium to work with women. Customers may not want to buy machinery and equipment from women, and they let their suppliers know. Or customers may not want to buy cars from women. This theory sees discrimination as personal prejudice, not as a structural problem. Economist Gary Becker wrote The Economics of Discrimination, the first treatise on this form of discrimination, and claims that this form of discrimination--taste discrimination--is all that exists. It is a theory of the economics of discrimination......
