From Countries to States, Here Are The Most Troubling Gender Pay Gap Statistics
From Germany to Louisiana, women are getting a lot less.
The current gender pay gap proves that International Women’s Day is still a necessary event.
This year’s IWD theme is titled #PressForProgress, and one of its goals is to push the conversation forward around inequality in the workplace.
Following the momentum of campaigns against workplace sexual harassment such as #MeToo and #TimesUp, the #PressForProgress theme comes at a perfect time to discuss the remaining gender pay gap.
To show just how wide the gender pay gap still remains to this day, here are some unfortunate parity statistics that still exist around the world.
The Wage Gap Remains High Overall
While the gender pay gap has narrowed over the past three decades, Pew reports that it still remains persistent among women in all countries.
The wage gap between men and women has narrowed, from 36 cents in 1980 to an estimated 17 cents per dollar earned by men in 2015, recent data states.
Women in the workplace continue to face lower pay wages.
Wage Gaps Differ by Country
Data collected from 144 countries in November, 2017 by the World Economic Forum shows that at a global level, four world regions have a gender pay gap of less than 30 percent.
East Asia and the Pacific have a 31.7 percent gap between men and women, while Sub-Saharan Africa has a gap of 32.4 percent.
In South Asia, on average men make 34 percent more than women for the same job. The Middle East and North Africa have the biggest problem: the gender pay gap is slightly less than 40 percent.
Even Developed Countries Have a Significant Problem
Unsurprisingly, countries with stronger economies have a shorter way to go when it comes to paying women equally, but there’s still a significant difference in wages.
Women in the European Union earned on average 16 percent less than men, according to 2016 statistics. This means European women earned, on average, 84 cents for every euro a man makes hourly. Across member states, the gender pay gap in 2016 ranged from just over 5 percent in countries like Romania and Italy, to a whopping 25 percent Estonia. Even hyper-modern economies like Germany still see a 22 percent wage gap between men and women for the same job.
Women in developing countries face larger pay gaps.
The Gap is Even Wider for Women of Color
While the wage gap exists for women overall, women of color have it even worse in the workplace, according to the American Association of University Women. “Hispanic or Latina, black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN), and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (NHPI) women had lower median annual earnings compared with non-Hispanic white and Asian women,” the AAUW reported last year.
The Wage Gap Differs by Industry
It’s no surprise that gender inequality varies depending on occupation. According to American Progress’s data, the worst pay gaps in 2015 were among women working in the finance and medicine fields, who made a mere 60 percent of what their male counterparts make. Meanwhile, occupations requiring less education, such as clerk work and order filling, have practically no wage gap at all.
U.S. States Breakdown
The overall wage gap in the U.S. moved from 67 percent to 83 percent between 1980 and 2015 — but it widens and narrows depending on the state. Data from the American Association of University Women shows the top state with the narrowest gap is New York, which has women earning 89 percent of men’s wages, followed by California at 88 percent. Meanwhile, the state with the worst pay gap is Louisiana, where women on average earn 70 percent of men’s wages.
