The global gender gap in labour income

Tewodros M Gebrewolde, James Rockey and Akbar Ullah

Oxford Economic Papers, 2025, vol. 77, issue 4, 1006-1036

Abstract: This article introduces a new measure of economic gender inequality (EGI) based on the ratio of women’s share of national labour income to men’s. This measure captures both the principles of equal pay for equal work and nondiscrimination. Importantly, it can be calculated from existing data and is comparable between countries and over time. If we simply consider an unweighted average of our measure of EGI, there has been an improvement between 1994 and 2014. However, once we weight countries by population, average EGI has been increasing. Much of the higher EGI in poorer, more populous, countries is explained by the lower rates of female employment in those countries.

Keywords: economic gender inequality; global distribution of income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D33 J16 J71 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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