If I was a teacher, and I only gave people with blue eyes compliments and told them that they were better than brown eyed people, would that be nice? If I gave blue eyed people better grades for the simple fact of their eye color, would that be fair? Well, a teacher named Jane Elliot conducted this exercise to exploit discrimination within a class of third graders. Let’s fast forward to 2016: we can still see a presence of discrimination. Although racism still exists, that topic can be saved for another article. In fact, the real discrimination being brought to the forefront today is the unequal pay gap between men and women.

According to payscale.com, the average registered male nurse makes 2% more than a registered female nurse. According to Boston Latin School Association, when comparing men’s and women’s overall earnings, men out-earn women. Now when I say this, I am talking about a woman having the same qualifications as a male with the same level of education, working the same job. We tend to see the pay gap drop below the ~80 cents on a dollar figure that is often reported. The Census Bureau calculated that the median woman in the United States makes 79 cents for every dollar that is paid to a man. This gap only gets worse when we look at race with black women only earning 60 cents, and Hispanics dropping to a disgusting 55 cents for every dollar put into a white male’s pocket.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) ran a census of the median annual earnings by race/ethnicity and gender for the year of 2014 and found that Latino men and women make the least, while Asian Americans make the most annually but have a high percentage of pay gaps. This was based on median annual earnings of full-time, year-round workers aged 16 and older. Latino males only make on average $32,272 annually and Latino females only make 89% of what males do and earn $29,791. Asian American males earn $60,425 while females only make 79% of what males make and earn $47,776.

Now these numbers are horrendous to look at and people just turn the other cheek. If we are a country of “equal rights” and we as a country pride ourselves on being the land of the free, how come women aren't being treated equally as men? It is understandable that women didn't even have the right to vote a century ago (August 18, 1920, to be exact) and that it took years before that at in 1848 with the convention in Seneca Falls, New York for the women’s rights movement to be recognized on a national level. But this is 2016, and this pay gap shouldn't exist as prominently as it does. Is it fair that the 2015 World Economic Forum report predicted that global gender parity would not arrive for another 177 years? No woman alive right now will ever be able to see gender equality. That doesn't sound like something anybody would want to hear.

So once again, I bring the question up: if you were paid less because of something you had no control over, would that be fair to you? If people over the height of 7 feet were paid double the amount a person under 6 feet, would that be fair? If genes are going to determine who makes more money, then shouldn't we have this policy integrated with all aspects of society? Although racism is already a policy that is hush-hush within big corporation and behind closed doors, it only the next big step we must take to bringing the human race together to work together instead using our selfish greed and egos to bring others down and should in fact try to build each other up to shrink these abhorrent, unequal wealth distributions between the people.