International Equal Pay Day, observed by the United Nations on September 18, seeks to draw attention to the continuous efforts towards the achievement of equal pay for work of equal value. Despite these efforts and the progress made in terms of women's participation in the labor force, no country has successfully closed the gender pay gap and globally, women still make roughly 80 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Even in countries like the United States, where women are now more likely than men to graduate from college, the gender pay gap persists. In fact, paradoxically, the gender pay gap actually widens with higher levels of educational attainment.
According to Census Bureau data analysed by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the gender wage gap stood at 20.3 percent for Americans without a high school degree and grew to roughly 30 percent for workers with a college degree or higher. Even straight out of college, the EPI finds, women get paid $4.50 less per hour than their male peers.
As a result of the persistent gender pay gap, "there's a lifetime of income inequality between men and women," Jemimah Njuki, Chief of Economic Empowerment at UN Women, and Jocelyn Chu, Programme Specialist at UN Women, wrote in a blog post last month. Pay transparency, minimum wages and strengthening workers' rights to bargain collectively for higher wages are critical ingredients for closing the gender gap, but ultimately, Njuki and Chu argue, "deeper changes in societal and cultural norms" are needed, especially with respect to equal sharing of caregiving responsibilities and domestic work between men and women.
