Author: Class, not gender, dividing American earners
CHICAGO (NewsNation) — The push for financial equity in America has generally focused on varying pay depending on gender and race.
One woman, however, feels the conversation should change.
“The people who claim to care about living in a more equitable society are focused on getting women higher paying jobs. When the truth is, whichever gender is graduating from college is going to get the better wages,” Batya Ungar-Sargon said during Tuesday night’s edition of “On Balance.”
Ungar-Sargon, author of “How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy,” noted that according to a new Pew Research Center study, in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women younger than 30 now earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts.
According to the report, in both the New York and Washington, D.C., metro areas, young women earn 102 percent of what young men earn. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area, the median earnings for women and men in this age group were identical in 2019.
Despite the overall trends that still show women closing the financial pay gap, Ungar-Sargon believes there’s still a problem, but that the underlying factor is not gender.
“We have a class divide,” Ungar-Sargon said. “We don’t really have a gender divide anymore, we don’t really have a racial divide anymore, we don’t even really have a political divide anymore so much as we have a class divide about whether or not you have a college degree.”
Women outnumber men in U.S. colleges. According to collegenews.org, nearly 60 percent of students in 2020-2021 were women.
“If you have 60 percent of people graduating from college are women, that’s going to, at some point, be reflected in the earnings, as well,” Ungar-Sargon said.
As a solution, Ungar-Sargon suggests rethinking how we value jobs in America, and encouraging more wealth to flow to working class, blue collar careers.
“There are a lot of jobs that should pay $100,000 or more that you do not need a college degree for,” she said.