Women make less money than men, even though they work 39 more days per year, according to a
global report on gender equality the World Economic Forum released Wednesday.
The analysis, which uses data from
33 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries ― including the United States, much of Europe, Nordic countries and nations in South America and Asia ― might seem odd at first.
You’d think that women would work
less than men. After all, more men than women are employed around the world. Eighty-eight percent of men ages 25 to 54 are part of the
labor force in the U.S., versus 73 percent of women. And in our prime working years, when incomes really
start to peak between age 35 to 44, the numbers spread out even further: 90 percent of men, compared to 74 percent of women.
Men also outearn women. Women in the U.S. earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Women around the world earn an average of $11,000 a year, compared to $20,000 for men, according to the new report.
The thing is, the OECD data considers
unpaid work ― the truly critical labor that must happen in order for societies to function: child-rearing, cleaning, cooking, caring for the elderly.
“It is simply valuable work because it is a lot of what it means to be human,”
Saadia Zahidi, the head of employment and gender initiatives at the World Economic Forum.
Women do an outsized share of this work ― and it’s holding back gender equality and economies around the world.
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
Women have longer workdays because they do so much more unpaid labor than men.
Politicians talk about the importance of unpaid labor in the U.S. ― family values and so on ― but our policies don’t reflect an understanding of its worth. We are one of a handful of countries, and the only advanced economy, that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave, which forces women and men to make some truly painful choices in order to have children.
Our policies do not acknowledge the reality that most women work outside the home and most couples raising children must scrape and scramble to afford childcare and to care for the children while earning money.
The fact that so many women are pulling double shifts of unpaid and paid labor is painful for the entire economy: It means women choose to work fewer hours, take less demanding jobs or leave the workforce entirely ― which dings our economic growth and productivity and sucks talent and innovation out of the system.
If women around the world were able to work for the same pay as men, it would add $28 trillion to the global economy, one report estimated last year.