The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are employed. In most countries, women are paid less than men for the same work. non-adjusted pay gap is the average difference in yearly earnings between male and female workers adjusted pay gap is the difference between how much men and women make for the same work, and it takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education attained, and job experience.
The global unadjusted gender pay gap is 68.5%. Recently, the pay gap has decreased most rapidly in Global South developing countries. In the European Union, there has been little change in the gender pay gap in the 21st century. In 2024 in the United States, according to Pew Research, women earned 85% as much as men, slightly up from 81% in 2003. Developed Asian economies have also entered a stage of relative stability, yet income disparities remain relatively larger compared with those in Western economies.
The adjusted gender pay gap is much smaller. This means that while women earn less over all, it is primarily due to differences between the jobs and working hours of men and women, rather than differences in pay for the same work. If occupational sorting is an outcome of gender discrimination, this would make it a bad control, making it impossible to draw valid conclusions about the role of gender discrimination on earnings. Although rewarding greater ability and productivity with increased responsibilities and compensation is generally regarded as a reasonable principle, evaluations of equality should also consider gender differences in career opportunities and trajectories. More comprehensive models are needed to assess equality fairly without bias or overcorrection.
Causes for gender pay gaps include having children and parental leave, gender discrimination, and gender norms. In the EU around two-thirds of the gender overall earnings gap is associated with lower women's working hours (gender hours gap) and lower women's employment rate (gender employment gap). The gender pay gap can be a problem from a public policy perspective in developing countries because it reduces economic output and means that women are more likely to be dependent upon welfare payments, especially in old age.
Historical perspective
In the United States, women's pay has increased relative to men's since the 1960s. According to US census data, women's median earnings in 1963 were 56% of men's. In 2016, women's median earnings had increased to 79% of men's. Analysis from the Institute for Women's Policy Research published in 2017 predicted that average pay would reach parity in 2059.
According to a 2021 study on historical gender wage ratios, women in Southern Europe earned approximately half as much as unskilled men between 1300 and 1800. In Northern and Western Europe, the ratio was far higher but it declined over the period 1500–1800.
A 2005 meta-analysis by Doris Weichselbaumer and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer of more than 260 published pay gap studies across over 60 countries found that, from the 1960s to the 1990s, raw (unadjusted) wage differentials worldwide fell substantially from around 65% to 30%. The bulk of this decline was due to better labor market endowments of women (i.e., better education, training, and work attachment).
Another meta-analysis of 41 empirical studies on the wage gap, conducted in 1998, found a similar time trend in estimated pay gaps: a decrease of roughly 1% per year.
A 2011 study by the British CMI concluded that if pay growth for female executives continues at current rates, the earnings gap between female and male executives would not be closed until 2109.
By 2022, cross-country comparisons show wide variation in the gender earnings gap, even after controlling for factors such as age, education, and part-time employment. The gap was lowest in Hungary at 9.9% and highest in South Korea at 40.6%. Analyses limited to wage differences within the same job category reveal a different distribution across countries. In Israel, gender was estimated to account for about 35% of the pay difference observed in identical roles. By contrast, in Hungary, nearly the entire within-job gap (96%) was attributed to gender. Spain recorded a relatively high share at 77%, while Germany (54%) and the United States (48%) were closer to mid-range levels.
Calculation
The non-adjusted gender pay gap or gender wage gap is typically the median or mean average difference between the remuneration for all working men and women in the sample chosen. It is usually represented as either a percentage or a ratio of the "difference between average gross hourly [or annual] earnings of male and female employees as % of male gross earnings".
The pay gap may be measured using different metrics: some studies compare the hourly wages of all workers, while others restrict the analysis to full-time, year-round workers. A 2025 analysis by the Pew Research Center found that in the United States, women earned about 85% of what men earned across hourly earnings (full- and part-time included).
Some countries use only the full-time working population to calculate national gender gaps. Others are based on a sample from the entire working population of a country (including part-time workers), in which case the full-time equivalent (FTE) is used to obtain the remuneration for an equal amount of paid hours worked.
Non-governmental organizations apply the calculation to various samples. Some share how the calculation was performed and on which data set. The gender pay gap can, for example, be measured by ethnicity, by city, by job, or within a single organization.
Causes
Some variables that help explain the non-adjusted gender pay gap include economic activity, working time, and job tenure. 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.
Industry sector
Occupational segregation or horizontal segregation refers to disparity in pay associated with occupational earnings.
A 2022 study by Folbre et al. illustrates how the concentration of women in care occupations contributes significantly to the gender pay gap. Their findings show that, while both women and men are affected by the care services wage penalties, women in these occupations face greater tribulations considering they are more likely to be employed in care services. In Jacobs (1995), Boyd et al. refer to the horizontal division of labor as "high-tech" (predominantly men) versus "high-touch" (predominantly women) with high tech being more financially rewarding. Men are more likely to be in relatively high-paying, dangerous industries such as mining, construction, or manufacturing and to be represented by a union. Women, in contrast, are more likely to be in clerical jobs and to work in the service industry.
A study of the US labor force in the 1990s suggested that gender differences in occupation, industry and union status explain an estimated 53% of the wage gap. A 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics found that the growing importance of the services sector has played a role in reducing the gender gap in pay and hours. In 1998, adjusting for both differences in human capital and in industry, occupation, and unionism increases the size of American women's average earnings from 80% of American men's to 91%.
A 2017 study by the US National Science Foundation's annual census revealed pay gaps in different areas of science. There is a much larger proportion of men in higher-paying fields such as mathematics and computer science, the two highest-paying scientific fields. 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. In the social sciences, the difference between men and women with PhD's was significantly smaller, with men earning ~$66,000 and women ~$62,000. However, in some fields, women earn more: women in chemistry earn ~$85,000, about $5,000 more than their male colleagues.
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. Women also remained outnumbered in the C-Suite 7 to 1.
A 2020 analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that gender wage disparities are present across most major occupational groups in the United States. The report noted that women working full-time in similar occupations still earned less than men, indicating that occupational wage gaps cannot be fully explained by differences in hours worked, part-time status, or employment type. Wage penalties were documented in a variety of professional and service sectors, suggesting that industry-level pay disparities persist even among full-time workers with comparable roles.
Sexual harassment Sexual Harassment in the workplace rooted in gender imbalance can cause women choosing a field or sector with more female colleagues, which increases the separation of men and women in a field. This separation is a factor in wage disparity, as positions usually held by men are paid higher than the positions usually held by women. Harassment against women in male-dominated fields occurs at higher rates than harassment against women in mixed-gender fields and it creates a barrier preventing women from advancing in a male-dominated field, causing them to seek lower wage jobs or restart their career which prevents them from bridging the pay gap. 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 sector.
Industries that have seen large gender disparities with higher male dominance include engineering, motor vehicles and transportation, energy and water control, and manufacturing. Industries with a higher female domination include nursing, sales, and social work. Industries with either type of gender domination have reported cases of sexual harassment, and this has an impact on the sector, with lost work costing $125,000 to $1,300,000 annually.
Sexual harassment can also occur in a power imbalance, such as a low-wage job in which one depends on a customer for tips, and in cases of isolation, such as a domestic care worker alone with a patient or client at a residence. 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. 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. Lack of pay, increased risk, and harassment rates cause women to move to lower-paying jobs across the labor market.
Policies against sexual harassment in the workplace do not have international standards; the definition and classification of sexual harassment are unable to encompass all cases or cultures, and methods of circumventing legal policies to condemn harassment cause women to avoid higher-paying jobs due to poor legal protections. At the national level, laws prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace improve women's economic outcomes and increase productivity for companies, creating a favorable labor market.
Discrimination