Gender pay gap: Women earn nearly 20% less than their male counterparts, study shows

Oct 28, 2021

With the collaboration of Statista.

shown here are some women in business working together

There's still a long way to go to close the gender pay gap. Image: UNSPLASH/Go to LinkedIn Sales Solutions's profile LinkedIn Sales Solutions

Katharina Buchholz

Data Journalist, Statista

On average, American working women are paid 82 cents for every dollar that working men make in the US.
On top of gender inequalities, American women are also facing race-related inequalities regarding their income.
Recent statistics highlighting these issues are outlined below.

Latina women in the U.S. had to work all the way through 2020 and well into October 2021 to earn the equivalent of the 2020 wages of white, non-Hispanic U.S. men. October 21 marked Latina Equal Pay Day, the last in a row of equal pay days for different races and ethnicities published by the National Women's Law Center, also comprising Black Women's Equal Pay Day on August 3 and Native American Women's Equal Pay Day on September 8 of 2021. The equal pay day for all U.S. women (compared to all U.S. men) was March 24. This means that on average, American working women are paid 82 cents for every dollar that working men make.

Have you read?

While Asian-American women outearn the average woman in the U.S., Latinas get paid no more than 55 cents for every dollar white, non-Hispanic men make. This pushes the date of Latina Equal Pay Day almost eight months down the line from the equal pay day for U.S. women overall.

Discover

What's the World Economic Forum doing about the gender gap?

The methodology for this survey is based on the median annual earnings of full-time, year-round workers irrespective of profession.

a diagram showing a visualization of the gender paygap

There are still many existing inequalities regarding race and gender. Image: Statista

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.