Assignment 6: Anne Nombe

Does having ovaries really mean I'm doomed by society? Will my future employer take one look at me, ascertain I'm a female, and knock off a few bucks for me but not my co-worker Steve? So I might get a non-traditional job, so I might get a ladder and climb to the top, so I might grab a hammer and shatter the sturdy, glass plafond looming above me, but will I have to pay an insurmountable fee for the ceiling I broke? 

I sought to answer these questions last year in Seminar class. At first, I saw it as an easy topic that was clear cut—women earned less just because they were women. 

However, my research took my thoughts on a very different turn. I was completely invested, reading arguments from both sides about the "gender tax" and learning more than I had ever known before about inequalities in the workplace. I found it was useless to hold onto previous biases in the face of all these shocking statistics. Sure, there was a clear discrepancy between genders, but the reason why wasn't just because they were women. This experience really taught me how our society view women's roles in work and how girls are oftentimes pressured or influenced into the lower paying jobs by their surroundings. I learned a lot of valuable information that I still think about to this day.