Money

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        Money.  Many people would say that money is the center of the universe.  Money gives power, the ability to do what one pleases, and the abilities to pamper ourselves with the luxuries the world has to offer.  The teenagers at North Olmsted High School typically tend to think of one thing, money.  For the Junior and Senior students at NOHS, money is what gives the students the ability to pay for gasoline, food, and the designer clothing everyone has to have. 

But, there is a question that I have to ask... 

"Would it upset you if you worked the same amount of hours at the same job, doing the same amount of work, and be paid less because of you gender?"    

This is the question my partner and I asked the students from the Junior and Senior Class at NOHS.  We took a sample of 40 students from each class and asked each student that was random chosen whether they held a job and then if they did, asked them to circle the category that included their wage earnings per hour.  Through random surveys, we collected the data that was distributed unknowingly to the student through one of their teachers.  Unknown who was conducting the survey, we hoped to determine whether their was a salary gap between male and female teenagers. 

With the collected data, my partner and I entered our results into a Minitab Program and performed a Chi-Square Test of homogeneity.  We performed the test at the significance level 0.05 and assumed that all expected cell counts would be greater than or equal to 5.0.  Unfortunately, 9 of our expected cell counts were less than 5.0, two of the cell counts actually being less than 1.0.  Because the expected cell counts were less than 5.0, we could not obtain a P-value, thus we could not make a valid conclusion to the question whether there was a salary gap between male and female teenagers.  Possible reasons why such a inconclusive test can be attributed to our sample size.  Possibly the 80 students that were randomly sampled were too small.  On the other hand, because of the 10% limit that can be used to reasonably performed on the students at NOHS, out of the 1,600 students, only a maximum sample of 160 NOHS students could have been taken.  Even this sample size may have been too small to perform a valid test. 

It have been proven that on average, adult males do tend to earn more than adult females.  This fact is one of the reasons why my partner and I decided to perform this study.  Unfortunately, the results of our study did not provide the necessary answers to our questions.  Hopefully, it can be assumed, regardless of whether there is a wage gap been males and females of all ages, that this salary gap can be attributed for the right reasons, not just of job and gender discrimination.