This community-engaged project is in partnership with the League of Women Voters Charlotte Mecklenburg Chapter. The purpose of the project is to compile data to inform a corporate scorecard on the important metrics of the gender equity gap. With the cooperation of Cate Stadelman, an automated design and virtual framework was engineered to provide the LWV with a detailed manual and beta toolsets. Pay by Position explored the nuances of the gender pay gap and the financial equity between administrative and worker-level positions. The current literature suggests that this paradigm of the gender pay gap is largely misunderstood. The gap between the wage of all female workers and male workers is much smaller than what most mass media and political positions broadcast. This is because the overgeneralized statistic of the 80% difference in gender is overlooking the majority of jobs taken by a specific gender. Within the US, there is a higher concentration of female workers in education and health care while there is an equally disproportionate number of males in the engineering industry. Some academic publications go into depth as to why the gap between different positions varies based on the industry. Tech and research institutions are more likely to keep the pay gap under control, or at least within the federal standards, than industrial or corporate businesses. The literature points back to the question of whether Tournament or Equity theory resolves this conflict. Unfortunately, both systems are flawed in the sense that they apply inconsistently across different industries. Presented at the 2022 UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Research Conference.
