In the United States, the law prohibits sex-based discrimination. So how can there be a pay gap in the first place? As surprising and confusing as it may be, it does indeed seem to be a real phenomenon: women are paid less than men.

To begin at the beginning, review the following National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) report, which answers the question What is Pay Equity? and provides some interesting statistics on the Wage Gap. Additionally, this site examines how that wage gap changes over time.

To learn more about the problem and what it means to real working women, review the following salary survey, which is a special database from Working Woman magazine.

Of course, women in the workforce have a right to equal pay and equal opportunity for advancement. It seems, however, that such rights are not enforced in the workplace. See the following overview of the situation, titled Worth More Than We Earn: Fair Pay for Working Women, which includes a graph of median wages for men and women. The report comes from the Womens Bureau, which is part of the US Department of Labor. The Women's Bureau has prepared several reports on the situation. You can learn more about the equal pay and the Women's Bureau in this Equal Pay Checklist.

The AFL-CIO is a labor organization, and obviously in favor of equal pay. The article, It's Time for Working Women to Earn Equal Pay, describes the situation from labor's point of view.

What do you think? Do you agree that a wage gap exists? In the next section, you will get a chance to examine some of the data on the wage gap.