Leela Rao / Opinion / 11 October 2023
The historical nature of teaching as a woman’s job is a cause for the low pay rates of modern teachers.
Image Credit: Flickr-1999 | CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
In March of 2023, teachers and service workers of the Los Angeles Unified School District went on strike to protest inadequate salaries. Despite the importance of their work and the high level of education and qualification that school teachers must attain for their profession, with the majority having master’s degrees, teacher salaries are still less than the average employee’s in every state. Could this possibly be indicative of a deeper societal issue?
Palisades Charter High School history teacher Mrs. Schoellnast notes that, despite there being many reasons contributing to the low pay of teachers, one of the primary reasons is that teaching was “historically a woman’s job.” Consider the Common Schools that were prevalent in the 1820s, which were essentially the predecessors to the public schools of today. These schools sought to employ female workers because the government found that they could get away with paying female teachers less than their male counterparts. Evidently, this exemplifies the little value placed on women’s work and the innate misogyny that is prevalent in the country’s history.
However, this is the 21st century; surely times have changed, right? Wrong—even today, teachers continue to face the gender pay gap. Therefore, the aforementioned teacher strike stands to illustrate a deeper, chronic issue which plagues women in the United States: the undervaluation of and disrespect for their work.
Though women hold at least half of all United States teaching jobs, according to a 2019 study, most are paid on average, 5,000 dollars less than men per year. This, and the gender pay gaps that are prominent across almost all professions, puts women at troubling disadvantages not just financially, but in their personal lives as well. Unequal power dynamics could develop when a woman is granted unwarranted lower pay than her husband if she has one, which only furthers misogynistic societal ideals. The lack of a self-sustaining income for women, which, as previously established, stems from not her own inability but the inability of society to appreciate her work, could create a dynamic where the man has more control over the relationship. The normalization of women with lower incomes has led men married to women to feel “increasingly uncomfortable” if their wife makes more than 40% of the household income. Additionally, single retired women are less financially secure than single retired men, meaning unmarried women may have to work more years than men to overcome the gender pay gap that they face.
The unequal pay received by women serves to perpetuate disadvantage into all aspects of their lives. It’s troubling to think that industries which so strongly depend on women’s work continue to undervalue them and the consequences this can bring. The gender gaps that are evident across various professions portray a deeper message that society still continues to hold an inherent and normalized disrespect for women’s work, despite efforts to strive towards higher education and take on more working hours.
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