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This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum. Author: Kate Whiting, Senior Writer, Formative Content
There’s good and bad news for working women across the globe: the gender pay gap is narrowing, but it still persists.
That’s according to the Gender Pay Gap 2019 report from job and employer review site Glassdoor, which compares the latest data with its initial study in 2016.
Based on hundreds of thousands of salary reports, including information posted anonymously on its site by employees, Glassdoor has estimated the gender pay gap in the following eight countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia.
Meanwhile, a new BBC report has found the gap actually widening in favour of men at almost half (45%) of firms in the UK. Overall, 78% of companies there reported a pay gap in favour of men to just 14% in favour of women and the rest reporting no difference.
Both reports come after the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, which found only 58% of the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap has been closed globally – and projected it would take 202 years for men and women to reach economic parity.
Here’s what Glassdoor found:
Men earn more than women
In all eight countries, men earn more on average for doing the same job as women. But the unadjusted gap (before applying statistical controls for worker and job characteristics) is largest in Germany with women earning about 78 cents per euro men earn. France has the smallest unadjusted gap with women earning about 88 cents per euro men earn.
The gap is narrowing
Since 2011, the US adjusted pay gap has dropped from 6.5% to 4.6%, with Glassdoor contributing the steady narrowing of the gap to greater labour force participation by women as well as greater awareness of the gender pay gap. But, as the above chart shows, it may still take until 2070 to fully close the gap. Clearly, the narrowing of the gap is not widely the case in the UK, as the BBC report has found.
 
But it grows with age
Glassdoor also found older workers experience a greater gender pay gap than younger workers. In the US, the adjusted pay gap for 18- to 24-year-olds was 1.4%. But this rose to 12.3% for 55- to 64-year-olds – more than twice the national average.
Job titles matter
As the above chart shows, the gender pay gap is greater in certain professions than others. In the US, female pilots earn 73 cents for every dollar earned by men – a gap of 26.6% – which is five times larger than the US adjusted gender pay gap of 4.9%. Chefs had the second highest adjusted pay gap, with a gap of 24.6%, while C-suite execs were third with a gap of 24%.
There’s no real salary confidence gap
Although men apply for jobs that pay on average 18% more than those women apply for on Glassdoor, this was found to be because they’re looking for different kinds of jobs, with different levels of education and experience. When equally qualified women and men apply for similar jobs, the ‘salary confidence gap’ – men and women having different expectations on the salary they deserve – drops to 0.7%. That’s significant because a gap in pay expectations between genders doesn’t explain the gender pay gap.