The gender pay gap, common everywhere, is particularly wide amongst groups who are highly educated. Highly educated women earn on average up to 30 percent less than their male peers, no matter how smart they are.
The latest Wage Indicator quarterly report, which substantiates this finding, focuses on gender issues on the occasion of Women’s Day, March 8th. In order to find correlations between workers’ levels of education and gender pay gaps, the worldwide Wage Indicator sample of 2010 was divided into 3 educational groups: those who didn’t finish their basic studies; a second group consisting of those with a middle education and/or after high-school; and a third group with academic or post-graduate degree. For each of these groups the gender pay gap was calculated. Those at the lower education end showed a considerably smaller gender pay gap, 18 to 20 per cent, as compared to female academics, with economists topping the bill with a pay gap of almost 30 percent.
The in-depth analysis is based on a comparison between 11 countries, found in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Read the full report The Gender Gap - A comparative analysis of wages in times of recession.
Wage Indicator has been collecting wage data online since 2001 in a growing number of countries worldwide, numbering 55 in 2011. The dataset is regularly updated to make comparison over time possible.