The Future of the Gender Wage Gap in the American Workforce

Abstract

This thesis aims to accomplish four goals. First, to establish the extent to which a gender wage gap exists in the American workforce and why it matters. Second, it seeks to explore the various factors that scholars have advanced as potential explanations for this gap with the aim of identifying a more concrete and all-encompassing root cause of the gender wage gap as it exists today. Third, this thesis will individually evaluate a succession of equal pay legislation which has been enacted to date in order to discern the effectiveness of previous attempts to address this root cause, as well as the gender wage gap as a whole, through legislative intervention. Finally, to offer prescriptions based on scholarly evidence of how this issue could be better addressed whether by strengthening past legislation or through the enactment of future equal pay legislation