Gender Pay Gap Calculator

• Which country has the smallest gender pay gap?
• Which has the biggest?
• What can every woman do to earn more?

Gender pay gap is a universal issue. There are countries, like Iceland, that have decided to ban the thing altogether, but in most places around the world, women earn less than men. How much less? How does gender and nationality affect your pay?

• Luxembourg: −0.8%;
• Belgium: 0.7%; and
• New Zealand: 2.7%.

• Israel: 28.8%;
• South Korea: 27.7%; and
• Japan: 20.1%.

Some women fought so hard for their paychecks that they earned what they deserved, not what their employers offered them. But according to studies, the gender pay gap comes from at least some element of discrimination.

But still, there are some things that a woman can do to earn what she should.

1. Always ask for more.

There is a hypothesis that women don't negotiate their salaries, so they earn less. It's not true, but what's true is that you always have to negotiate your paycheck.

New Statesman magazine wrote a story about how several women earned more thanks to their negotiating strategies. For example, one of them wrote down a list of reasons that she deserved more money than was advertised. She memorized it and told her future employer all those reasons and got what she wanted.

Sometimes, you earn what you've managed to negotiate, not what you deserve. The lesson is: always be prepared and use facts in the negotiations, even though the other side won't use them.

2. Don't be modest.

Have you ever met a male colleague who always talks about how much he does? Don't you find that only rarely do his words meet his actions? It turns out, on average, the louder he speaks, the more money he will get.

Don't be afraid to speak about the work you do. People will remember that, and eventually, you will get the paycheck you want.

3. Choose wisely.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a paper, "Promoting gender equality to strengthen economic growth and resilience". The paper fundamentally shifts the focus away from "how women can negotiate better" and places it squarely on "how systems and firms need to change" to ensure fairness.

The report identifies the following as structural changes that move the needle:

• Organizations should assess and equalize pay disparities with greater transparency.
• Initiatives targeted to parents to equalize the career costs of children.
• Investing in women to provide them with the skills necessary to transition back to work after long absences.

We need to look at solutions from a broad macroeconomic perspective. Solving the gender pay gap requires collective action and will not be solved by individual women changing their behavior. Government policies and corporate structures also need to address the problem.

Every little decision you make can impact your future earnings. The best thing you can do is to listen to what you want to do and what you know you would be best suited to do for a living, not what society tells you to do.

The OECD's Council on Gender Equality in Education, Employment, and Entrepreneurship issued the following recommendations for battling gender-based salary inequalities:

• Encouraging women to take up careers in science and technology and promoting equal access to good-quality education.

• Family-friendly policies in the workplace, such as access to affordable, good-quality early childhood education and care, and employment-protected paid maternity and paternity leave.

• Put women in decision-making positions.

• Strengthen the legal framework and its enforcement for combating all forms of discrimination in pay, recruitment, training, and promotion.

• Reduce barriers to female entrepreneurship and ensure equal access to finance for female and male entrepreneurs.

• Develop and implement initiatives and programs aimed at addressing women's financial literacy needs.

So… why does the Gender Pay Gap actually exist?

The study of wage discrimination began in 1957 with the work of Becker (Becker, G. S., 1957, The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Since then, it has become a routine task of labor economists.

Wage discrimination affects women, irrespective of their age or level of education. It is influenced by interrelated work, family, and societal factors. For example:

• Stereotypes — there are jobs considered to be reserved for women and others that are supposed to be for men only. It's the latter that has a higher salary.

• Race — studies from the United States show that non-Hispanic white and Asian American women earn less than their counterparts of other races. Plus, within their racial/ethnic group, the disparity between their incomes and the incomes of men is larger.

• Age — women usually get 90% of what men are paid until they are about 35. From that point, the median earnings for women grow more slowly than men's until the gap widens to 19%-24%.

• Children — time spent away from the labor market or working part-time, which is a common thing for mothers but not fathers, affects earnings.

• Pure discrimination — differences in wages are perceived as the most common form of indirect discrimination of women. Many factors are contributing to differentials in earnings; they cannot, however, account for all disparities. The remaining unexplained portion is attributed to discrimination.

We've taken the data from Eurostat, the OECD and ResearchGate. In those cases where datasets overlapped, we took data from the body that's more "local" (Eurostat for European countries).