What's Really Equal?

        Since making great strides as a society to make everyone truly equal, with acts such as desegregation and women's suffrage, since then many people have gone on to think that now that people of a different race or gender have the same rights doesn't mean that were all equals yet. Still in today's society people are discriminated and unequally treated all on the same basis they were originally being treated in equally, because they were a different race or gender. The American workplace to this day still unequally compensates people based on a demographic such their ethnicity or whether they are male or female. This discrimination of pay in the American workplace is a clear display of inequality in today's society when we are all supposed to be treated as equals .

       With programs set up today such as the equal employment opportunity commission we are expected to believe that  all person's no matter their race has an equal chance to be employed and receive equal compensation, and while people are being employed regardless of their race the compensation these races are receiving is unequal compared to others. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics African American men receive the lowest average weekly wage among all races with an average of $957 a week, while white men continue to earn a significant amount more than African Americans with an average of  $1,273 from a job in the same field. The discrimination is also seen in Hispanic men as well who still average less than their white counterparts with with an average weekly income of $1,002. This unequal compensation for the same amount of work is a clear sign of racial compensation inequality in the work place and continues to show that although everyone of a different race has the same rights as one another in this country it does not yet mean that we are all equal.

    The inequality does not just stop with people of a different race. Research from the Huffington post has also shown that while women can get jobs in the same field as men they still earned only 77 cents for every dollar a man in their field would earn. This report shows that women are still making 23% less than men in their same field. Even though women's suffrage has already been passed for quite some time and laws are in place to offer women an equal opportunity at employment, they still receive less compensation for the exact same amount of work as their male counter parts. While women are said to be equal to males this very sizeable discrimination in pay shows that as a society we have yet to accept women as equals. This information presented shows that while by law all genders and races are equal, society has yet to completely accept different races and women as complete equals and that it will take some time still until both women and people of all races are paid the same wage for the same job.





http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110914.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/gender-wage-gap_n_3941180.html