In 2026, nine states with pay transparency laws successfully closed the controlled gender pay gap, including California, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Hawaii, and Vermont. At the same time, inconsistent or unjustified pay practices expose organizations to growing legal and reputational risk. However, numerous studies indicate that variables such as hours worked account for only part of the gender pay gap and that the pay gap shrinks but does not disappear after controlling for many human capital variables known to affect pay. Beyond overt discrimination, multiple studies explain the gender pay gap in terms of women’s higher participation in part-time work and long-term absences from the labor market due to care responsibilities such as motherhood penalty, among other factors. In 2017, Germany passed the Transparency in Wage Structures Act, which requires larger employers to publish information on gender pay gaps and gives employees the right to information about their salaries relative to members of the opposite gender. The gender pay gap excludes part-time earnings, casual earnings, and increased hourly rates for overtime.

A growing best practice is to leverage compensation software to monitor pay equity continuously — with every hire, pay raise, promotion, or organizational change — so that potential disparities are caught before they widen. Illegal pay gaps occur when differences are driven by protected characteristics such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, disability, or retaliation. Research suggests that evaluation language and criteria can vary, and standardized, objective criteria help ensure performance assessments are based on job-related factors. Organizations should ensure that performance evaluation criteria are applied consistently across all employees. When controlled for job and other compensable factors, the gap narrows but does not disappear, with women earning roughly $0.99 for every dollar men earn. Payscale’s 2026 Gender Pay Gap Report finds that women earn $0.82 for every dollar men earn when data are uncontrolled.

The current extent of the gender pay gap is due to factors such as differing working hours and varying labor market participation. According to data from the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), the gender pay gap narrowed by over 10% between 2002 and 2015. The gender pay gap of full-time workers regarding monthly gross wages has narrowed over the past few years. When the gender pay gap legislation was introduced, the government stated that it would build a central portal to store the data, but this portal has not yet been delivered; no date has been communicated for its delivery as of November 2023. The Gender Pay Gap Information Act 2021 required all companies with more than 250 employees to publish annual gender pay gap reports, detailing mean and median gender pay gaps, bonus gaps, and information about gender representation within pay quartiles. Industries with strong collective bargaining coverage, such as the public sector, show a smaller gender pay gap.

What is the gender pay gap among all workers, including part-time?

According to Goldin, these expectations cause women, on average, to prioritize temporal flexibility, take different risks, and avoid situations where discrimination is expected. The company can accommodate risk through payouts; however, men are paid more for the risk they face than women who face the same or higher risk. This creates variability of risk, which pushes victims to choose one career over another to avoid risk, and it creates a further pay gap by separating labor and risk by gender. Sexual harassment creates costs to the victim and to the company as economic models show that harassment lowers wages, creates losses due to turnovers and legal costs, and shapes the labor market as a whole by segregating which gender can work in a specific https://clojure-android.info/a-quick-overlook-of-your-cheatsheet-2/ sector. A Morningstar analysis of senior executive pay data revealed that senior executive women earned 84.6 cents for every dollar earned by male executives in 2019. Men accounted for about 75% of doctoral degrees in those fields (a proportion that has barely changed since 2007), and were expected to earn $113,000 compared with $99,000 for women.

Contributing Factors to the Gender Pay Gap

In Luxembourg, a negative gender pay gap in unadjusted gross hourly earnings was observed at -0.9% in 2023, which indicates that, on average, women are paid more for each hour of work compared to men. Studies also show that this discrimination is a result of how employers tend to view mothers and fathers differently after having children. Further, studies have shown that the motherhood penalty has been unwavering, rather than declining like the gender pay gap. In a 2016 interview, Harvard Economist Claudia Goldin argued that overt discrimination by employers was no longer a significant cause of the gender pay gap, and that the cause is instead more subtle cultural expectations, which are a legacy of historical discrimination. Gender-specific factors, including gender differences in qualifications and discrimination, overall wage structure, and the differences in remuneration across industry sectors all influence the gender pay gap.

• The gender pay gap is the difference in earnings between women and men.
• Research finds that work by men is often subjectively seen as higher-quality than objectively equal or better work by women compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding on research grants.
• The median salary for men is higher than the median salary for women and has been since Payscale started tracking the gender pay gap.
• The chart shows the percentage of men and women who report borrowing any money in the past 12 months to start, operate, or expand a farm or business.

The essay highlighted that the gender pay gap exists for every industry and all across Hollywood. Oscar-winning American actress Jennifer Lawrence has also brought international attention to the gender pay gap with an essay in fellow pay gap advocate Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter. According to Serge Desmarais and James Curtis, the „gender gap in pay …is related to gender differences in perceptions of pay entitlement.” Similarly, Major et al. argue that gender differences in pay expectations play a role in perpetuating non-performance related pay differences between women and men. Several studies found a significant motherhood penalty on wages and evaluations of workplace performance and competence even after statistically controlling for education, work experience, race, whether an individual works full- or part-time, and a broad range of other human capital and occupational variables.

• As we can see there is a weak positive correlation between GDP per capita and the gender pay gap.
• Seven of the top 20 jobs with the widest gender pay gaps this year also made the list last year.
• Men still make more in industries where women are more represented.
• Once women reach the level of manager/supervisor, the controlled gender wage gap widens, with women at this level earning $0.98 for every $1 men make.
• The uncontrolled gender pay gap is sometimes called the “opportunity gap.”

Some studies of simulated salary negotiations have found that men on average negotiated more aggressively than women. In addition to maternity leave, Walter Block and Walter E. Williams have argued that marriage in and of itself, not maternity leave, in general will leave females with more household labor than the males.citation needed The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that married women earn 75.5% as much as married men while women who have never married earn 94.2% of their unmarried male counterparts’ earnings. However, even in relatively gender-equal countries like Sweden, where parents are given 16 months of paid parental leave irrespective of gender, fathers take on average only 20% of the 16 months of paid parental and choose to transfer their days to https://www.kajisoku.net/getting-started-next-steps-4/ their partner. The results showed that women scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to receive equal credit and that among grant applicants men have statistically significant greater odds of receiving grants than equally qualified women. Research finds that work by men is often subjectively seen as higher-quality than objectively equal or better work by women compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding on research grants.

In Q2 2026, women earned $0.82 for every dollar men made in a typical week.

About half of employed women (48%) report feeling a great deal of pressure to focus on their responsibilities at home, compared with 35% of employed men. Employed women and men are about equally likely to say they feel a great deal of pressure to support their family financially and to be successful in their jobs and careers, according to the Center’s October survey. About three-quarters of Democratic women (76%) say this, compared with 59% of Democratic men.

Here we try to answer these questions, providing an empirical overview of the gender pay gap across countries and over time. The 'gender pay gap’ comes up often in political debates, policy reports, and everyday news. As pay transparency requirements evolve, widening gaps are no longer a reputational risk employers can ignore.