The gender pay gap is slowly shrinking, but men still make 23.7 percent more than women and are 41 percent more likely to hold a managerial position by the end of their career.
The new findings come from Paygap's Gender Pay Gap report, which highlights the striking persistence of workplace inequities. The study surveyed 1.8 million employees from 2014-16 seeking to find differences in pay, career progression, and opinions of gender issues at the workplace.
Recommended For You
That gap of 23.7 percent does not account for a variety of factors that typically influence compensations, such as years of experience, education and management responsibilities. It only factors the median salary for all men and women. When the study controlled for those factors, the gap shrunk to 2.4 percent.
The older the workers, the larger the pay gap. When men and women enter the workforce, nearly the same percentage of each group works in individual contributor roles.
However, men are 85 percent more likely to be vice presidents or C-suite execs by the time they're between 35-40 years old and 171 percent more likely by the time they hit 60. Paygap calls this an opportunity gap.
Indeed, while young women are more likely to have college or graduate-level degrees, their chances of reaching the C-suite remain slim. Less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are female.
But what is unclear how much the gender disparities in the C-suite are shaped by more conservative views of gender roles that will presumably be less prevalent among the next generation of corporate leaders. Many of today's CEOs began their careers working for men who came of age long before the women's liberation movement.
The gap between men and women varies by state and industry. In Louisiana the adjusted income gap is 7.4 percent, while in some northeastern states women actually make slightly more.
Finance is home to the largest uncontrolled pay gap, at 29.1 percent. That indicates that while women in finance who perform the same job as men might be getting paid fairly, they are far less likely than men to be hired into top positions.
According to CNBC, none of the 22 largest investment banks in the U.S. have ever had a female CEO.
Business and support services have the smallest uncontrolled pay gap, at 7.6 percent.
The sector in which women are most likely to be paid less for the same job, however, is the mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction industry. Women in those jobs make 7.4 percent less than men with equivalent qualifications and equivalent roles, the study finds.
The smallest controlled gender pay gap is in education, where women make only 0.6 percent less than their male peers. That finding is relatively easy to explain: The vast majority of educators work in public schools whose compensation is strictly based on a set of criteria, typically years of experience and education.
As is the case with much of the public sector, managers typically do not have much discretion when it comes to compensation, and are therefore less likely to be affected by personal biases.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
