What is the gender pay gap?
In developing nations, the gender pay gap is often exacerbated by limited access to education and employment opportunities for women. Australia has experienced a persistent gender pay gap, with women’s earnings averaging 83% of men’s earnings in 2024. Luxembourg notably has a negative gender pay gap of -0.7%, indicating that women, on average, earn slightly more than men. Within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the gender pay gap exhibits considerable http://shrikrupa.org/ambassador/nitya-venkateswaran/ variation.
- The uncontrolled gender pay gap is what women make compared to men regardless of occupation, experience, education, and other compensable factors.
- The uncontrolled gender wage gap reflects where women and men work within industries.
- The chart above shows that women’s control over household spending tends to be greater in richer countries.
- In 2026, the uncontrolled gender pay gap is $0.82, meaning that women collectively earn 18% less than men based on how they’re paid for the jobs they have now.
- 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.
- At Oxfam, we’ve been fighting for women’s rights for years, working with organizations like 9to5 to advocate for policies that support and protect working women.
According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, improving gender equality in the EU might result in a 9.6% rise in EU GDP per capita, http://www.floridakeyswildliferescue.org/other/adoption-of-a-decree-on-the-creation-of-the/ or €3.15 trillion, as well as an additional 10.5 million employment by 2050. The researchers estimated the causes of the wage gap as follows, lack of work experience was 7%, lack of formal training was 5%, occupational segregation was 25%, working at smaller firms was 3%, and being female represented the remaining 60%. Ignoring opposing factors, as the number of hours females work increases, eliminating the entire gender wage gap from 17% could be worth around $93 billion, or 8.5% of GDP. A 2009 report for the Australian Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs argued that, in addition to fairness and equity, there are strong economic imperatives to address the gender wage gap. They estimated that „26 million female jobs in 30 countries (28 OECD member countries, Cyprus, and Singapore) are at a high risk of being displaced by technology (i.e., facing higher than 70 percent likelihood of being automated)” over the next two decades. The researchers found that female workers performed more routine tasks in their jobs than men did, and that men are more vulnerable to automation.
A 2009 study of high school valedictorians in the U.S. found that female valedictorians were planning to have careers that had a median salary of $74,608, whereas male valedictorians were planning to have careers with a median salary of $97,734. Numerous studies indicate that the pay gap shrinks but does not disappear after controlling for occupation and a host of other human capital variables. The researchers found statistically significant pay differentials between jobs defined as „male” and „female,” which suggest that gender-based discrimination, arising from occupational stereotyping and the devaluation of the work typically done by women, influences salary allocation.
- Economist David Neumark argued that discrimination by employers tends to steer women into lower-paying occupations and men into higher-paying occupations.
- As for LGBTQ+ pay gap by gender, LGBTQ+ men earn 96 cents for every dollar the typical worker earns while LGBTQ+ women earn 87 cents.
- In the United States, the gender pay gap is about 10 cents bigger in the remote workforce than in the non-remote workforce, according to a report by PayScale.
- In this chart, we plot the share of currently married women who report having a say in major household purchase decisions, against national GDP per capita.
- Women begin their careers earning less than men when data are uncontrolled, and the pay gap only widens with age.
- 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.
NOW YOU KNOW MORE ABOUT THE GENDER PAY GAP
In this chart we can also see that the 'unexplained’ residual has gone down. When comparing the contributing factors in 1980 and 2010, we see that education and work experience have become much less important in explaining gender differences in wages over time, while occupation and industry have become more important.6 In contrast to this, when the gap is calculated after accounting for underlying differences in education, experience, and other factors that matter for the pay gap, then the result is the adjusted pay gap. The next chart shows available https://metis-history.info/collegesorority.html estimates of this metric for full-time workers in the US, by age group.
Contributing Factors to the Gender Pay Gap
However, even after explicit barriers are lifted and legal protections put in place, discrimination and bias can persist in less overt ways. However, these observed differences are far from being biologically fixed – 'gendering’ begins early in life and the evidence shows that preferences and skills are highly malleable. Note that these two examples are from Denmark – a country that ranks high on gender equality measures and where there are legal guarantees requiring that a woman can return to the same job after taking time to give birth. The importance of job flexibility in this context is very clearly illustrated by the fact that, over the last couple of decades, women in the US increased their participation and remuneration in only some fields. Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development shows that education also fails to explain wage gaps if we include workers with zero income (i.e. if we decompose the wage gap after including people who are not employed).