Key Findings on Inequality and Discrimination in the US
Posted by Tamara Franklin of AYTM
At the Insighter Virtual conference, Melissa Gonsalves – Co-Founder & Director, Colour of Research (CORe) & Director of Strategic Insights at Differentology delivered a riveting presentation titled, ‘Equality in an Unequal World.’
She tackled the hard-to-swallow facts on how imbalanced the world currently is due to rife inequality. She also dove into the very timely topic of diversity and how you can use it to enrich your market research.
In this post, I’ll share some key learnings, strategies, and tools from her presentation to empower you to conduct and use diverse research and build a team that is representative too.
What’s the difference between equality and diversity?
Since one of the goals of this post is to shed light on diversity and equality, it’ll be useful to begin with a few definitions related to these topics:
Inequality – A lack of being equal, especially in status, rights, or opportunities. You can categorize inequality into five broad categories: inequality in wealth, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and health.
Equality – It’s essentially the reverse of inequality. All operate on a level playing field with equal opportunities regardless of any differing traits.
Diversity – A mixing of people with different characteristics—for example, race or nationality.
Discrimination – Discrediting or disadvantaging someone based on (a) characteristic(s) they possess. For instance, gender and race.
Controlled Gender Pay Gap – The controlling of the pay gap according to factors like job positions, years of experience, and location.
Uncontrolled Gender Pay Gap – The raw gender pay gap which looks at median salaries for men and women, regardless of job or worker seniority.
Zero/Negative Wealth – When a person’s debts exceed the value of their assets.
We’ll be looking at wealth, gender, and ethnicity, with cross-sectional examples for better context.
The truth about inequality and diversity in wealth, gender, and ethnicity (+ the statistics)
Without data, it’s hard to know the true extent of an issue. So, it’s time for some eye-opening stats about inequality, diversity, wealth, gender, and ethnicity. Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Wealth across gender
In an uncontrolled gender pay gap, women earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
In a controlled gender pay gap, women earn 90 cents for every dollar earned by men. In other words, the median salary for men is roughly 19% higher than the median salary for women.