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The Global Gender Pay Gap Won’t Close for 118 Years

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Bailee Abell

Finally! Women will get equal pay to men…118 years from now, that is. 

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Gender Gap Report, an extra quarter of a billion women have entered the workforce since 2006. Sounds amazing, right? Well, it would be a lot more empowering if we were paid equally. The report shows that while the number of women in the workforce has increased, our gender pay gap has widened. In 2006, while the global average annual earning of a man was $11,000, it was $6,000 for the average women; compare this to 2015, where the global average annual earning is $21,000 for a man and $11,000 for a woman. 


So finally, women are making the same amount…that men did in 2006. What a shocker. 

To make matters worse, the World Economic Forum estimates it will take approximately 118 years for women and men to be paid equally. But why is that?

Well, according to the Guardian, the gender wage gap has hardly improved since the financial crisis of 2008, and many people still subscribe to past ideals of women staying at home while men bring home the bacon—leading to bad parental leave and childcare policies that don’t allow women the flexibility they need at work.


However, what doesn’t make much sense is that the report indicates a reversal in education, according to the BBC. In 98 countries, more women attend universities than men. And to top it off, 68 countries employ more women than men in skilled positions, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers. Given this, we should definitely be paying women more. 

But the impact of the gender pay gap goes beyond just a lack of money. It causes women worldwide to become less motivated and passionate, and feel less supported. And, as the Guardian reports, pay discrimination is not only a loss to women, but also to employers and the world’s economy at large. 

“It’s the same with all sorts of discrimination, whether it’s of a sexual orientation or whatever,” Willem Adema, senior economist for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, told the Guardian. “If discrimination means people not pursuing individual aspirations to the full … the economy loses out on a lot of talent.”

While the feminist movement is still going strong, we still have a long way to go. 

What do you think about the gender pay gap, and how does it affect you? 

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Bailee Abell is a third-year English major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is the Editor-in-Chief of her college newspaper, The Bottom Line. She is an aspiring journalist, an avid drinker of agave lattes, and a lover of adventures (near or far). She can be found in local coffee shops and sunny places, editing articles or watching episodes of Gilmore Girls, rarely without a coffee in hand. Her blog is at BaileeAbell.blogspot.com.