Most don’t notice a pay gap

It will take 118 years to close the gender pay gap in the workplace, the World Economic Forum predicted last year. Despite its documented existence, however, most American workers don’t notice the difference between what men and women make, new research shows.

A report released Thursday by salary and employment website Glassdoor found 89 per cent of workers felt men and women should be paid equally for equal work, and 60 per cent said they would not apply for a job at a company if they believed gender compensation was unfair. The website surveyed 8,254 full-time and part-time employees in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Yet despite their strong defence of workplace equality, most survey respondents seemed unconvinced that the pay gap extended to their office: In the U.S., 78 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women felt their workplace paid men and women equally, Glassdoor found.

“The challenge of changing the gender pay gap is that people don’t think they’ve experienced it firsthand,” said Susan Duffy, executive director for the Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership at Babson College. In the U.S., the average woman makes 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

The study shows that employees in different age groups think differently about the gender pay gap. Eighty-one per cent of U.S. employees between the ages of 18 to 24 would not consider working at a company with a known gender bias, which is the same for young millennials in most of the other countries surveyed. But after age 24, employees are a lot less idealistic. In the U.S., the percentage of people morally against working at a company with a gender pay gap drops to 68 per cent, said the report. People aged 45 and older are the most complacent: Only 13 per cent would turn down a job at a place with a gender pay gap.

Some companies are making public strides toward equality. Last year, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich pledged US$300 million toward achieving gender and racial parity in its workplace.