In honor of International Women’s Day, which was Monday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Factblog has been dissecting data on women’s role in the world.
Wages was one item examined. The chart below shows the percentage difference between the typical earnings of a full-time male worker and his female counterpart:
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
Across industrialized countries, men’s median, full-time earnings were 17.6 percent higher than women’s. The biggest gender wage gap was in Japan and South Korea, where men earn wages more than 30 percent higher than women, and was smallest in Belgium, where the gap is 9.3 percent.
In the United States, the typical full-time female worker earns 19 percent less than the typical full-time male worker.
Much of this gap can be explained by the types of jobs women choose to go into (or, perhaps, the types of jobs that are available to them).