The gender pay gap (also known as gender wage gap) is the difference between male and female earnings expressed as a percentage of male earnings, according to the OECD. The European Commission defines it as the average difference between men’s and women’s hourly earnings. There is a debate to what extent this is the result of gender differences, implicit discrimination due to lifestyle choices (e.g., number of hours worked, need for maternity leave), or because of explicit discrimination.
Read more about Gender Pay Gap: Adjusted and Unadjusted Gender Pay Gap, Gender Pay Gap Over Time, Anti-discrimination Legislation
Famous quotes containing the words gender, pay and/or gap:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“The ornament is a statuette, a black figure of a bird. I am prepared to pay on behalf of the figure’s rightful owner the sum of $5000 for its recovery. I am prepared to promise, to promise ... what is the phrase?—’No questions will be asked.’”
—John Huston (1906–1987)
“The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)