Something most people don't like to talk about is privilege. Privilege by definition is, "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people" (x). Generally, people with privilege dislike talking about it because they don't believe they have it.
Privilege can come in many shapes and forms: sex, race, age, sexuality and class, to name a few.
One example of male privilege is the wage gap. I'm sure you've seen the jokes and graphics about women making 77 cents for every dollar men make.
And that is true when talking about white women. For women of color, they earn even less per dollar compared to white men as shown below in a graph from ThinkProgress.
According to the Social Security Administration (2013), the average salary was $46,481.52. To put this wage gap ordeal into perspective, I'll use this average to to calculate about how much a salary for women of color, listed above, would be. For the purpose of this example, white men will have the average salary.
White Men: $46,481.52
Latina/Hispanic Women: $25,100.02
American Indian/Alaska Native Women: $27,424.10
African American Woman: $29,748.17
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Women: $30,212.99
White Women: $36,255.59
Asian Women: $41,833.37
This is by no means an actual list of statistics, but merely an example to show hypothetically how much women of color earn compared to white men.
I have heard countless reasons of why women do not deserve the same wage as men, and most of them have come from men. They range from, "Women can't do the jobs men can" to "Women aren't [strong/smart] enough to do that job." I definitely disagree because women may not be biologically engineered to be as strong as men, but they have the ability to be just as strong, or stronger than some men. With intelligence, women are generally proven to be smarter than men (x).
But since women still do most jobs that men do, there is still a gap between men and women in the same occupation groups as shown below in the graph,
There is a much more obvious gap on some of these occupations. The weekly gap is anywhere from around $200 to nearly $800 less a week.
People often say that there is no wage gap because of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, but obviously things haven't quite evened out. Women are still fighting for the same pay as their male coworkers just like other minorities are attempting to fight for the rights they supposedly won back in 1964.
There's no time like the present, and there's no present like equality.