Employers that ensure internal pay equity benefit from higher employee morale, increased productivity, and stronger talent retention, reducing costly turnover. Over the past half-century, the gender pay gap has generally narrowed, but the rate of change has varied across regions and periods. While the gender pay gap has not changed a lot since 2003, it has narrowed considerably when looking at the longer term, both among all workers 16 and older and among those 25 to 34. For categorical variables with more than one category, like region and race and ethnicity, the decomposition analysis tells only how the variable as a whole—not its specific categories—contributed to the gender pay gap.

• Gender Norms — While STEM industries show progress toward pay equity, traditional gender norms continue to widen the gap in other sectors.
• The 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report analyzes crowdsourced data from over 369,000 people in the U.S. who took Payscale’s free online salary survey between January 2024 and January 2025.
• AI is transforming total rewards from personalizing benefits to modeling pay equity.
• Research has documented that career progression patterns differ for mothers compared to fathers.

After adjusting for inflation, the gender pay gap was narrowest in the second quarter of 2023, when men earned $192 more per week than women. Employed women and men are about equally likely https://medicalcases.eu/nhs-turns-to-mumsnet-to-fill-nurse-vacancies/ to say they feel a great deal of pressure to support their family financially and to be successful in their jobs and careers, according to the Center’s October survey. And while 43% of Republican women say unequal treatment by employers is a major reason for the gender wage gap, just 18% of GOP men share that view. Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts in each party to say a major reason for the gender wage gap is that employers treat women differently.

All people in categories outside of the Hispanic or Latino (regardless of race) category were non-Hispanic. This resulted in an occupational variable with 82 categories, ranging in size from 327 to 98,499 employees. OPM’s Handbook of Occupational Groups and Families https://financeswizards.com/achieve-success-management-guide.html defines the occupational series, groups, and families (OPM, 2018).

The future of total rewards: human, with a little help from AI

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. However, a 2018 study analyzing the pay gap of Uber drivers showed the existence of a 7% gender disparity in hourly wages in a context where gender discrimination was impossible at the employer level (contracts and algorithms were gender blind) and where there was no evidence of discrimination at the rider level. A 2019 study found that even when blinded to the gender of the applicant, applications written by males were more likely to be funded. In contrast, a 2018 audit study substituted common names of black men, white men, black women and white women on grant proposals and found no evidence of bias by scientific reviewers. The results showed that women scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to receive equal credit and that among grant applicants men have statistically significant greater odds of receiving grants than equally qualified women. Research finds that work by men is often subjectively seen as higher-quality than objectively equal or better work by women compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding on research grants.

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• Second, it is a result of choices after marriage – the researchers show that married women with higher earning potential than their husbands often stay out of the labor force, or take ‘below-potential’ jobs.33
• Higher education, a shift to higher-paying occupations and more labor market experience have helped women narrow the gender pay gap since 1982.
• Further, studies have shown that the motherhood penalty has been unwavering, rather than declining like the gender pay gap.

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 https://supiral.com/Speaking/speakers-are-at-stake worldwide fell substantially from around 65% to 30%. 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. Efforts to address pay disparities are critical for the economic security of women and their families. Since the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and other civil rights laws, the gender wage gap had been gradually narrowing.

• 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.
• Women are much more likely than men (61% vs. 37%) to say a major reason for the gap is that employers treat women differently.
• For example, the gender pay gap for those aged 30 to 39 years stood at 4.4%, while for employees aged 40 to 49 years, it was more than double at 9.1%.
• To understand how we calculate the gender pay gap, read our 2013 post, “How Pew Research Center measured the gender pay gap.”
• The gender pay gap among older employees was more than double the gender pay gap among younger employees.
• According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, improving gender equality in the EU might result in a 9.6% rise in EU GDP per capita, or €3.15 trillion, as well as an additional 10.5 million employment by 2050.

If progress continues at the same pace as it has since 2000, it will take until 2071 for women working full-time year-round to reach pay equity with men. In 2024, women earned only 80.9 cents for every dollar earned by men—the lowest gender earnings ratio since 2016, when women earned 80.5 cents to the dollar compared to men. This will result in revised ASHE data, which we will communicate with users. This will also have an impact on the revised 2023 data, compared with the provisional 2023 data.