It is difficult, but as the next section shows, social norms can be changed, too. Changing these incentives is of course difficult because it requires reorganizing the workplace. However, in many countries, gender gaps in education have been closed and we still have large gender inequalities in the workforce. Around the time the US entered World War II, it is estimated that 87% of all school boards would not hire a married woman and 70% would not retain an unmarried woman who married.12 These work prohibitions are important because they applied to teaching and clerical jobs – occupations that would become the most commonly held among married women after 1950. You can influence tastes, and you can certainly teach people to tolerate risk, to do maths, or to negotiate salaries.
Adjusted for the amount of hours worked (and not including unpaid national military service hours), these wage differences are reduced to approximately 5.7% (non-taxed) and 0.4% (tax-adjusted). The European Commission has stated that the undervaluation of female work is one of the main contributors to the persisting gender pay gap. At the EU level, the gender pay gap is defined as the relative difference in the average gross hourly earnings of women and men within the economy as a whole. Between 1990 and 2020, the gender pay gap remained within a range of between 13 and 19%. Moreover, the World Economic Forum provides data from 2015 that evaluates the gender pay gap in 145 countries. In the United Kingdom, a 2015 study compiled by the Press Association, based on data from the Office for National Statistics, revealed that women in their 20s were out-earning men in their 20s by an average of £1,111, reversing a previous trend.
Women who remain at their current job may feel stuck in their positions because of benefits they can’t give up due to parental responsibilities. Women seeking new jobs may also be in high-turnover industries where pay is technically more equitable, but less lucrative. This is likely the result of low-paying minimum wage roles and jobs with union/institutionalized pay schedules. An uncontrolled gender wage gap exists for women regardless of their work-from-home status, and it’s widest for women who work from home “as needed” ($0.76). These occupations are characterized by high female representation.
The gender pay gap also widens as women age and progress in their careers. When data are controlled for job title and other compensable factors, the gender pay gap narrows to $0.99, which is a gap. The gender pay gap is based on data science and studied by multiple accredited institutions working on independent datasets.
Gender differences in job roles, aspirations
In contrast, women use «passive and indirect methods», which reveals that women evaluate a job based on gendered biases and underestimate their abilities, but men evaluate a job based on pay. Research suggests that transparency with salary expectations helps women request higher salaries and face less backlash. Because of this, girls end up pursuing careers that focus on communication and caregiving, while boys pursue careers that focus on STEM and leadership roles. Studies show that the pay gap begins to take shape early in children’s lives and does not begin at the workplace. Some research suggests that women are more likely to volunteer for tasks that are less likely to help them earn promotions, and that they are more likely to be asked to volunteer and to say yes to such requests.
In most countries, there is a substantial gender pay gap
By comparison, the gender pay gap among workers of all ages that year was 15 cents. Comparing the pay of full-time workers only helps isolate differences among men and women working similar hours in the same period. After adjusting for inflation, the gender pay gap was narrowest in the second quarter of 2023, when men earned $198 more per week than women. A 2023 United Kingdom survey found that managers were 15% less likely to give promotions to women who work remotely compared to the office, and were 30% less likely to give promotions to men verbatim.
WHAT ARE SOLUTIONS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP?
There are legal reasons one employee can be paid more than another when doing the same job, such as company size, location, responsibilities, specialized skills, and performance. Regular pay equity audits help employers identify and correct disparities before they grow. Policies that help close the gender pay gap focus on reducing hidden inequities and improving https://barancikfoundation.org/grants/ accountability. Organizations should ensure that performance evaluation criteria are applied consistently across all employees.
In Q2 2026, women earned $0.82 for every dollar men made in a typical week.
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 2019 paper by the International Monetary Fund predicted that women are significantly more likely than men to be displaced by automation. The Glass Ceiling exists on a spectrum that impacts gender with factors of race, physical ability, and social class, which causes discrimination at lower levels of the hiring stage to shape who reaches senior levels at the company.
- While on average women earn $0.99 compared to $1 for men when data are controlled, the pay gap is wider for some jobs.
- Overall, 38% of states have closed the controlled gender pay gap in this year’s sample.
- When the gender pay gap is calculated by comparing all male workers to all female workers – irrespective of differences along these additional dimensions – the result is the ‘raw’ or ‘unadjusted’ pay gap.
- However, in many countries, gender gaps in education have been closed and we still have large gender inequalities in the workforce.
Ability, personality, and social norms
The chart here shows how quickly female wages increased in pharmacy, relative to other professions, over the last few decades in the US. 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). The unexplained residual may include aspects of unmeasured productivity (i.e. unobservable worker characteristics that could not be accounted for in the study), while the «explained» factors may themselves be vehicles of discrimination.
By this measure, the gender wage gap is expressed as a percent (median earnings of women as a share of median earnings of men) and it is always positive. These estimates include OECD member states, as well as some other non-member https://www.firstsign.us/the-path-to-finding-better-6/ countries, and they are the longest available series of cross-country data on the gender pay gap that we are aware of. Cross-country data on the gender pay gap is patchy, but the most complete source in terms of coverage is the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO). When the gender pay gap is calculated by comparing all male workers to all female workers – irrespective of differences along these additional dimensions – the result is the ‘raw’ or ‘unadjusted’ pay gap.
Half the people doing the job earn more than the median, while half earn less. Excludes individuals whose duties are primarily installation, sales, repair, and technical support. May assist in network modeling, analysis, planning, and coordination between network and data communications hardware and software.
USAFacts is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative making government data easy for all.
A recent survey of international employment law firms showed that gender pay gap reporting is not a common policy internationally. Causes for gender pay gaps include having children and parental leave, gender discrimination, and gender norms. For example, studies have found statistical gender differences in ‘people skills’ (i.e. ability to listen, communicate, and relate to others). Biological differences in tastes (e.g. preferences for ‘people’ over ‘things’), psychological attributes (e.g. ‘risk aversion’), and soft skills (e.g. the ability to get along with others) are also often argued to be at the heart of the gender pay gap. Differences in biological attributes that determine our ability to develop ‘hard skills’, such as maths, are often argued to be at the heart of the gender pay gap.21 Do large gender differences in maths skills really exist?