#WeAreWomen: What You Probably Didn’t Know About the Wage Gap

There are a variety of gaps in people’s wages and until now, in 2018, there is still a glaring wage gap in women and men, especially higher up into the corporate ladder. If you still didn’t know, here are some unbelievable information about the wage gap between men and women—and what can be done to close it.

Women comprise more than half of the world’s population—but only contribute to a third of the world’s GDP

Despite the fact that 100 million girls were not born into the world because of sex-selective abortion—yup, you heard that right, India and China—women still constitute a large chunk of the global population.

According to a 2015 study by business and economics research-focused group McKinsey Global Institute, despite the overwhelming number of women in the world, they only contributed 37 percent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In fact, according to their study, 75 percent of unpaid labor in the whole world is done by underemployed women.

The wage gap widens higher up the corporate ladder

Did you know that as women get promoted, the wage gap widens even further between them and their counterpart men? According to a report by the international research and payment solutions company PayScale in November 2015 entitled “Inside The Gender Pay Gap,” they found that as a woman gets promoted to a higher position, the more the difference becomes between her pay and men in the same position.

In lower corporate positions, wage gap can be in an average around 2.7 percent. But female executives are found to be making as much as 6.1 percent less than male executives in the same position.

Close the gender gap by making more gamer girls

In a talk by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the Bellevue in Philadelphia about gender equality, she underlined how important it is to let the younger girls get their share of gaming and computer time as much as the boys. According to Sandberg, computer games are gateways to interest in computer science and many kids learn or take an interest in coding because of how much they play games or use the computer. Sandberg urged the parents, “Give your daughters computer games. Ask them to play them.”

As computer science and information technology (IT) dominates the work sphere, bringing more women into the field will also increase the gender’s wage potential. Up to now, there is a very small number of women getting engaged in scientific and electronic fields—and video games just might open that door to them.

New York is the only place in the world where women dominated men

There was a point in recent history when New York became the only state where women dominated the working field. According to a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research from 2011 to 2013, New York women earned a dollar more than their male counterparts. Not a lot, but still a significant win for working girls all over the world.

Closing the wage gap will take as long as a century

A century—that means 100 whole years. And it can take even longer than that. 2017 was one of the worst years for gender wage equality compared to the previous two years. According to a World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Global Gender Gap Report in 2017, at the rate the workplace and wage equality is going, it’s going to take the world 100 years to close the gender gap compared to the estimate of 83 years last 2016.

If the wage gap is closed, the world will actually become richer

This is not a conspiracy theory. Again, this is not a conspiracy theory. Women should be paid just as much as men—that much is a fact. To give incentive to the world to actually do something to make this happen, the same report by the McKinsey Global Institute found that if the gender wage gap didn’t exist, the world would be $28 trillion richer.

According to the research, “We consider a ‘full-potential’ scenario in which women participate in the economy identically to men, and find that it would add up to $28 trillion, or 26 percent, to annual global GDP in 2025 compared with a business-as-usual scenario. This impact is roughly equivalent to the size of the combined US and Chinese economies today. We also analyzed an alternative “best-in-region” scenario in which all countries match the rate of improvement of the best-performing country in their region. This would add as much as $12 trillion in annual 2025 GDP, equivalent in size to the current GDP of Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined, or twice the likely growth in global GDP contributed by female workers between 2014 and 2025 in a business-as-usual scenario.”