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In 2019, 55 percent of men agreed that achieving equality between men and women was personally important to them, while a further 29 percent identified themselves as being a feminist. This text...
Dec 17, 2019 · The WEF predicted it would take 99.5 years for women to be on an equal footing with men, despite women taking high-profile leadership roles at the European Central Bank and the World Bank,...
Oct 6, 2021 · The BBC's analysis found that by sector, the worst gender pay gaps on average are in education (26%), finance and insurance (24%) and construction (23.8%). The private household services...
- How Does The Gender Pay Gap Look Like Across Countries and Over time?
- Why Is There A Gender Pay Gap?
- How Well Do Biological Differences Explain The Gender Pay Gap?
- How Are Women Represented Across Jobs?
- How Much Control Do Women Have Over Household Resources?
The 'gender pay gap' comes up often in political debates, policy reports, and everyday news. But what is it? What does it tell us? Is it different from country to country? How does it change over time? Here we try to answer these questions, providing an empirical overview of the gender pay gap across countries and over time.
In almost all countries, if you compare the wages of men and women you find that women tend to earn less than men. These inequalities have been narrowing across the world. In particular, most high-income countries have seen sizeable reductions in the gender pay gapover the last couple of decades. How did these reductions come about and why do subst...
Across the world, women tend to take on more family responsibilities than men. As a result, women tend to be overrepresented in low-paying jobs where they are more likely to have the flexibility required to attend to these additional responsibilities. These two facts – documented above – are often used to claim that, since men and women tend to be ...
Representation of women at the top of the income distribution
Despite having fallen in recent decades, there remains a substantial pay gap between the average wages of men and women. But what does gender inequality look like if we focus on the very top of the income distribution? Do we find any evidence of the so-called 'glass ceiling' preventing women from reaching the top? How did this change over time? Answers to these questions are found in the work of Atkinson, Casarico and Voitchovsky (2018). Using tax records, they investigated the incomes of wom...
Representation of women in management positions
The chart here plots the proportion of women in senior and middle management positions around the world. It shows that women all over the world are underrepresented in high-profile jobs, which tend to be better paid. The next chart provides an alternative perspective on the same issue. Here we show the share of firms that have a woman as manager. We highlight world regions by default, but you can remove them and add specific countries. As we can see, all over the world firms tend to be manage...
Representation of women in low-paying jobs
Above we show that women all over the world are underrepresented in high-profile jobs, which tend to be better paid. As it turns out, in many countries women are at the same time overrepresentedin low-paying jobs. This is shown in the chart here, where 'low-pay' refers to workers earning less than two-thirds of the median (i.e. the middle) of the earnings distribution. A share above 50% implies that women are 'overrepresented', in the sense that among those with low wages, there are more wome...
Women often have no control over their personal earned income
The next chart plots cross-country estimates of the share of women who are not involved in decisions about their own income. The line shows national averages, while the dots show averages for rich and poor households (i.e. averages for women in households within the top and bottom quintiles of the corresponding national income distribution). As we can see, in many countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, a large fraction of women are not involved in household decisions about sp...
In many countries, women have limited influence over important household decisions
Above we focus on whether women get to choose how their own personal income is spent. Now we look at women's influence over total household income. 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. We see that in many countries, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, an important number of women have limited influence over major spending decisions. The chart above shows that women’s cont...
Land ownership is more often in the hands of men
Economic inequalities between men and women manifest themselves not only in terms of wages earned but also in terms of assets owned. For example, as the chart shows, in nearly all low and middle-income countries with data, men are more likely to own land than women. Women's lack of control over important household assets, such as land, can be a critical problem in case of divorce or the husband’s death. Closely related to the issue of land ownership is the fact that in several countries women...
- Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser
- 2018
Jun 20, 2023 · In terms of Economic Participation and Opportunity (73.2%), there remains a 12.5% gender gap in labour-force participation. Estimated earned incomes of both men and women have been increasing since 2006, but men’s income increased at a higher rate than that of women, worsening the gap (score 64.2%) by 4 percentage points since.
Aug 12, 2024 · Gender divides limit productivity growth, perpetuate income inequality, and are plain violations of human rights that prevent girls and women everywhere from reaching their full potential....
Oct 6, 2021 · A new global analysis of progress on gender equality and women’s rights shows women and girls remain disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with disproportionately high job and livelihood losses, education disruptions and increased burdens of unpaid care work.
