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Gender Wage Gap: Causes, Impacts, and Ways to Close the Gap

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Gender Equality

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Economy; Equality; Income; Occupational segregation; Sustainable Development Goals

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Pay inequity between men and women in the same position is defined as inequal pay and is consistently found across the globe in varying degrees and in many different sectors of labor (UN 2015). Inequal pay within an organization or within the labor market leads to a difference in average earnings between men and women, which is defined as the gender wage gap. The European Union defines the gender wage gap as “the relative difference in the average gross hourly earnings of women and men within the economy as a whole” (European Commission 2012). Statistically, this difference at the time of writing means about 20% lower earnings for women or 83 cents for every US dollar earned by a man (Geiger and Parker 2018). This means that over the course of a 40-year career, a woman experiences a lifetime wage gap of $403,440 (NWLC 2018).

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Goal 5 of the United Nation Sustainable...

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Correspondence to Laura Schifman .

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© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Schifman, L., Oden, R., Koestner, C. (2019). Gender Wage Gap: Causes, Impacts, and Ways to Close the Gap. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Özuyar, P., Wall, T. (eds) Gender Equality. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70060-1_50-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70060-1_50-1

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