The average gender pay gap is a good measure of the collective pay for a group. Measuring gender pay gaps by median allows us to understand the experience of the typical employee at a workplace, as it is not skewed by exceptionally high or low salaries. Closing the gender pay gap is important for Australia’s economic future and reflects our aspiration to be an equal and fair society for all. The gender pay gap is a measure of how we value the contribution of men and women in the workforce. Stay current on the June 2026 labor market, AI’s impact on work, pay transparency laws, and compensation trends affecting employers.
The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are employed. A good share of the increase in the gender pay gap takes place when women are between the ages of 35 and 44. This is linked to an increase in the pay of fathers – a phenomenon referred to as the “fatherhood wage premium” – and tends to widen the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap in the EU stands at 12 % in 2023 and has only changed minimally over the last decade.
This means that the results are not due to random variability or chance (Smith, 2023). Gender pay gap in U.S. hasn’t changed https://newmarch.org/category/interview-techniques/ much in two decades. The EEOC will continue to collaborate with and support stakeholders as they strive to achieve greater equal employment opportunity. The results of this report can help EEO practitioners to better focus their efforts to address barriers.
Gender Wage Gaps Persist
Factory Berlin is a commercial space that has sought to attract tech companies and startups and so far has rented out office space to international brands including Uber and Pinterest as well as local startup SoundCloud. Recent analyses indicate that in 2025, the gender wage gap widened for the second consecutive year, with men’s earnings rising 3.7% while women’s did not change. One persistent indicator of gender inequality in the workplace has been the gender pay gap. 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.
- 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.
- In addition, a 2022 EEOC report found that the average salary for Federal employees age 40 and over was higher than the governmentwide average.
- In 2023, research at PayScale showed that women’s average pay as a percent of men’s increased from 83% to 99% when controlling for job title, education, experience, industry, job level, and hours worked.
- One study estimated that 10% of the convergence of the gender gap in the 1980s and 30% in the 1990s can be accounted for by the increasing availability of contraceptives.
- Assessments show that reducing the gender pay gap by one percentage point would increase the gross domestic product by 0.1%.
Race & Gender Wage Gaps
Over the same period, the shares of women in several lower-paying fields, such as administrative support jobs and food preparation and serving occupations, fell significantly. Notably, the gender wage gap has closed more among workers without a four-year college degree than among those who do have a bachelor’s degree or more education. In part, this may be linked to how the gains from going to college have changed in recent decades, for women and men alike. By 2022, 48% of employed women had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 41% of men.
Figure 6: Explore the gender pay gap by occupation
This equates to the average woman over age 40 being paid approximately $5,230 less than their male counterparts annually, compared to the average woman under age 40 being paid $1,248 less. One explanation is that women had attributes (personal characteristics or human capital) that generally would result in more pay—but, in practice, men with the same attributes were paid more. This means the results are not due to random variability or chance (Smith, 2023).
What is the gender pay gap?
This year, we have further increased flexibility around working hours by removing fixed core hours. The difference in grade distribution is likely to be the main driver of the overall gender pay gap. In comparison, the mean gender pay gap for the Civil Service reduced to 6.9% in 2025, and the median gender pay gap reduced to 6.4% in 2025.
The earnings difference between women and men varies with age, with younger women more closely https://www.hoygan.info/overwhelmed-by-the-complexity-of-this-may-help approaching pay equity than older women. According to the American Association of University Professors 2018–19 faculty compensation survey, women full-time faculty were paid on average 81.6% of men and these differences are primarily due to men being in disproportionately at higher paying institutions and having higher ranks. Several studies of women in the legal profession reveal persistent gaps in partnership numbers at major American Law Firms.
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. 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. In most rich countries, it’s small when formal education ends and employment begins, and it increases with age. The next chart shows available estimates of this metric for full-time workers in the US, by age group.
Vermont had the smallest gender pay gap in 2025 — Oklahoma the largest.
- While women’s and men’s earnings may shift slightly each year with each new batch of Census Bureau data, the gender wage gap will not close anytime soon without concerted action.
- This resulted in an occupational variable with 82 categories, ranging in size from 327 to 98,499 employees.
- 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.
- The gender pay gap in the United States has hardly moved over the past two decades.
- The uncontrolled gender pay gap is not less meaningful than the controlled gender pay gap.
This phenomenon – known as the fatherhood wage premium – is one of the main ways that parenthood affects the gender pay gap among employed workers. But even as pay parity might appear in reach for women at the start of their careers, the wage gap tends to increase as they age. The U.S. labor force, used interchangeably with the workforce in this analysis, consists of people 16 and older who are either employed or actively looking for work.
In 2017, the UK Government introduced pioneering legislation requiring organisations with 250 or more employees to report annually on their gender pay gap. Compared to the wider Civil Service, where the mean gender pay gap is 6.9%, the Insolvency Service performs favourably. Reducing the gender pay gap creates greater gender equality while reducing poverty and stimulating the economy, as women would get more to spend more. On the other hand, almost a third of men are employed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which are higher-paid sectors.The number of women in science, technology and engineering has increased. About a quarter of the total gender pay gap can be explained by an over-representation of women in relatively low-paying sectors, such as care, health or education. The gender pay gap means women are at higher risk of poverty in old age.
