Living in today’s world is already challenging without the added problem of misinformation being presented as truth. The phrase “fake news” was made popular by Trump, largely as a tool to convince his followers that mainstream media couldn’t be trusted. However, just because he misused the term doesn’t mean the underlying issue isn’t real. We live in an age where people spend a significant portion of their day endlessly browsing social media. Often, they come across a headline and accept it at face value, without pausing to think critically or even reading the full article. Add to this the fact that news outlets today heavily prioritise clicks to generate ad revenue, leading them to craft sensationalist headlines designed to provoke curiosity or reinforce what people already believe.
On top of this, modern society has become increasingly influenced by relativism and a distorted form of post-modernism, leading some individuals to conclude that there are no objective truths — only differing opinions. This mindset is genuinely dangerous, as it creates an environment where harmful or bigoted behaviour can be excused as a matter of cultural perspective, leaving little room for moral accountability.
That said, one movement that tends to attract particularly harsh criticism and smearing is feminism. It poses a threat to several powerful groups: first, men who hold traditional patriarchal views and feel uncomfortable with the idea of women being their equals; second, organised religion, as virtually all major faiths historically place women in a subordinate role to men. Beyond that, feminism also challenges deeply ingrained social norms in many parts of the world, where women are still expected to stay home, raise children, or defer to men. And even setting all of that aside, there is a clear financial incentive for certain corporations to resist pay equality — if the wage gap were closed, their salary costs would rise. It’s worth keeping this in mind when considering why there are those who are motivated to argue that the gender wage gap simply doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, as discussed earlier, this kind of messaging finds fertile ground in a world where people are prone to accepting whatever they encounter online without much scrutiny.
This piece aims to cut through the noise and present the facts surrounding the Gender Wage Gap. So, let’s get into it.
Actually — enough of the preamble. Let’s begin. We’ll start with a quote from Wikipedia, which offers a solid overview of what’s actually going on.
There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: unadjusted versus adjusted pay gap which takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience. For example, someone who takes time off maternity leave will likely not earn as much as someone who does not take time off from work. Factors like this contribute to lower yearly earnings for women, but when all external factors have been adjusted for, there still exists a gender pay gap in many situations (between 4.8% and 7.1% according to one study). Unadjusted pay gaps are much higher. In the United States, for example the unadjusted average female’s annual salary has commonly been cited as being 78% of the average male salary.
To start with, there are essentially two ways of approaching this issue. Naturally, the situation varies by country, though the US and Canada are fairly similar in this regard. The EU appears to fare somewhat better, but it is still far from achieving true equality. That said, including more favourable data wouldn’t necessarily undermine the argument being made here, so it’s only fair to draw from all three — the US, the EU, and Canada. As for other regions of the world, such as countries in Africa, the data there tends to reflect even wider disparities, meaning they don’t really serve as a counterargument to the existence of a wage gap.
The Unadjusted Pay Gap
This particular way of measuring the pay gap does not account for factors that may contribute to it, such as education, hours worked, job title, industry, time off, and so on. This is the method that tends to produce the largest gap figures. As referenced earlier, research has shown the disparity to be quite significant — women earn roughly 78 cents for every dollar a man earns in the US. In the European Union, the most recent unadjusted gap stands at 16.4% according to a 2012 Eurostat report. This measure makes no attempt to factor in hours worked, the nature of the job, time off, or experience — it simply compares the average salaries of men and women side by side. You might wonder what the point of such a comparison is, arguing that pay should reflect only the amount and difficulty of the work done, along with experience.
However, very little in life is so straightforward. Even this broad analysis reveals some meaningful patterns. For one, men and women tend to be concentrated in different professions — women are most commonly found in administrative roles, followed by cashier and teaching positions. This raises the question of whether women are being pushed or steered into these roles rather than being encouraged to pursue more advanced careers. But even without going that far, the unadjusted data alone offers further insights worth examining.
Looking within the same companies and sectors, women are disproportionately represented in lower-paying positions, which clearly contributes to the large unadjusted gap. One might respond that it’s simply a matter of the work being done, but is it truly reasonable to assume this is entirely a result of personal choice? Women’s skills and competencies tend to be undervalued compared to men’s, and they remain significantly underrepresented in management and senior roles. Some might argue this is less about pay and more about questioning why men continue to dominate the highest-earning positions — and that could hold some weight if we were only looking at the unadjusted gap. But since this imbalance is precisely what drives the unadjusted gap in the first place, dismissing its relevance to the pay gap altogether doesn’t quite hold up. One could choose to set gender aside entirely and focus on education, social conditions, and other contributing factors — and there is certainly work to be done in those areas, too. But as will become clear in the section on the adjusted pay gap, the issue doesn’t disappear even after those factors are accounted for.
Another point worth keeping in mind in the context of the unadjusted pay gap — particularly for those who might suggest that women simply gravitate toward easier jobs — is that, across occupations, men almost universally out-earn women. In other words, even in fields dominated by women, the highest earners are still men. The same holds true in male-dominated fields, unsurprisingly. Out of the 20 most common occupations held by women, men earned more in 18 of them. The same pattern appeared in male-dominated occupations — men earned more in 18 out of 20. This data dates back to 2012, but it remains relevant; if anyone has more recent figures, feel free to share them in the comments.
Another frequently repeated Argument is that women earn less because they tend to avoid risky, dangerous, or physically demanding jobs. While it may be true that women are less represented in such roles, the reality is that these jobs are not actually among the highest-paying. The occupations with the highest fatality rates — farming, mining, transportation, and construction — are not particularly well-compensated. The evidence simply does not support the idea that greater physical danger translates to significantly higher pay. That may be an injustice in itself, but it is the reality. With that said, let’s move on.
The Adjusted Pay Gap
The adjusted pay gap is an analysis that controls for all the variables mentioned earlier, looking specifically at men and women in identical positions, doing the same work for the same number of hours, to see whether a pay difference still exists.
It’s worth noting that the EU and the US measure this differently. The EU looks at the average difference in hourly earnings between men and women, while the US calculates it as a ratio of women’s annual earnings to men’s. The EU acknowledges that direct discrimination — meaning unequal pay for the exact same job — accounts for only a small portion of the overall gap, attributing this largely to the effectiveness of European legislation. Even so, the EU does concede that direct discrimination exists, even if it considers it minor.
In the US, the Department of Labour has stated that decades of research consistently show a gender pay gap, even after accounting for factors such as the type of work performed and qualifications, including both education and experience. So here we have both the US Department of Labour and the EU Council acknowledging that the pay gap persists, even after years of research and decades of pay equality legislation. No matter how the data is broken down, the gap remains visible. It can be reduced by narrowing the comparison to identical roles, but it does not disappear entirely.
A CNN Money column cites research on school teachers, a profession where women make up over 70% of the workforce, yet men still earn more for the same role — female teachers earn roughly 87 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The same column references retail, where women earn around 70 cents on the dollar, and law, where the figure is 83 cents. For a comprehensive breakdown of US job data from 2016, the US Bureau of Labour Statistics provides direct occupational comparisons. On a more positive note, a separate CNN Money analysis from 2014 identified pharmacists as a notable exception to the trend. However, even the most optimistic studies — those that fully adjust for every variable and overlook the fact that women are often excluded from the highest-ranking positions — have not managed to close the gap entirely. Even in software development, widely considered the most progressive industry in the world, a pay gap of around 1% was still found to exist in the US. And even if one were to accept those findings entirely at face value, the question of why 90% of workers in that field are men remains completely unaddressed — a gap the study acknowledges is larger at the executive level.
An article by Bryce Covert in The Nation further illustrates that men out-earn women even in female-dominated fields. It also references a study in which managers, given a fixed budget to distribute as raises among employees with equal skills and experience, consistently awarded larger increases to men than to women. These points clearly point to active discrimination at play.
As the EU report “Tackling the Gender Pay Gap in the European Union” notes, women’s skills tend to be undervalued, particularly in occupations where they make up the majority of the workforce.
This results in lower rates of pay for women. For example, physical tasks, which tend to be carried out by men, are often valued more favourably than those carried out by women. For instance, a female cashier in a supermarket earns less than a man working in the stockroom. – 2014.
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Another study from GPI Atlantic states:
When controls are introduced for such demographic, labour market, and productivity-related characteristics as education, work experience, marital status, job tenure, job status, union status, size of firm, size of residential area, industry of employment, and occupation, the wage rate paid to a female worker in New Brunswick continues to be about 17 percent lower than that paid to a man. A similar national study conducted by Statistics Canada found this result to be 11 percent for Canada as a whole.
When all this data is taken into consideration, the gap remains, however small. And do not forget that things like bonuses, which are more likely to be given to men, can further increase this. So, adjustments only get us so far. There still exists this, as some would say, “unknown” component of the gap. You might call it unknown, yes, but some of it is known, and it’s discrimination. By the way, the adjustments in the Pay Gap can be analysed in reverse. To quote from Wikipedia:
A wide-ranging meta-analysis by Doris Weichselbaumer and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer (2005) of more than 260 published adjusted pay gap studies for over 60 countries has found that, from the 1960s to the 1990s, raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially from around 65 to 30%. The bulk of this decline, however, was due to better labor market endowments of women. The 260 published estimates show that the unexplained component of the gap has not declined over time.
Other important things to consider
While not directly tied to the pay gap itself, it’s worth acknowledging that women shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid labour. Domestic work and caregiving are largely uncompensated, yet society continues to place the burden of these responsibilities primarily on women. As a result, women tend to dedicate more of their time to family and household duties, while men face no such expectation — allowing them to work longer hours, which in turn contributes to the unadjusted pay gap. Addressing this imbalance would require a cultural shift in which household and childcare responsibilities are equally expected of both men and women. In most first-world countries, this isn’t overt discrimination so much as a deeply ingrained and largely unquestioned social norm. For a more in-depth look at this issue and the broader concept of time Poverty, Melinda Gates’ 2016 Annual Letter is worth reading.
It’s also important to note that there is evidence suggesting that some managers assume men, as primary breadwinners, have a greater need for promotions or job opportunities than women — a bias documented by Eurofound and referenced by RationalWiki.
There is also evidence that women are more likely to be fired as a result of downsizing.
Conclusion
Taking all of the evidence into account, it is clear that the gender wage gap exists in both its unadjusted and adjusted forms. It may shrink to as little as 1% in certain fields, but it never fully disappears. And a significant portion of it cannot be explained by measurable factors alone, which strongly suggests that some form of discrimination is at work.
Part of the picture is that many women are not brought up to advocate for themselves in salary negotiations — a product of their socialisation rather than any lack of capability. This is a real issue that needs to be addressed at its root. Similarly, women’s underrepresentation in certain fields — STEM being the most obvious example — deserves serious attention and analysis. It is also worth considering that much of the gender pay gap may not stem from deliberate, conscious discrimination, but rather from the way men are socialised, which is itself a problem that society needs to confront.
The bottom line is that denying the gap exists or placing the blame squarely on women leads nowhere. What is needed is the courage to face these interconnected issues head-on, as a society. It is a challenge humanity is more than capable of meeting.
Citations
- O’Brien, Sara Ashley (April 14, 2015). “78 cents on the dollar: The facts about the gender wage gap”. CNN Money. New York
- European Commission on Justice & Gender Equality – What are the causes?
- RationalWiki, citing amptoons.com
- Toronto Sun, from Reuters (2012)
- Myth Busting the Pay Gap (2012)
- Payscale.com
