Women scientists earn less than men all over the world

While women and men at early- and mid-career stages in the U.S. received nearly equal pay, women professors only received 88 percent of the income male professors did.

Unequal pay for men and women doing the same work is not a problem unique to US life scientists. The Scientist’s data, gathered from countries across the globe, reveal a pervasive discrepancy in the salaries men and women take home, as women’s incomes worldwide ranged from 75 to 99 percent of the paychecks earned by their male counterparts. The discrepancy was not consistent around the world, however. The greatest gender gaps appear in salary data from the U.S. and Canada, while data submitted by life scientists in Latin America and Asia revealed relatively small differences in overall compensation between men and women.

“On the face of it, earnings are higher in the U.S.,” says Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a US nonprofit think tank, “and the wage gap is higher”—likely as a result of a lack of transparency about expected salaries for specific positions, and because women are less likely to work in the highest-earning positions. “That makes sense to me,” Hegewisch says, “but the results from Latin America and Asia are a little more surprising.”

Read more:
2014 Life Sciences Salary Survey

Source: The Scientist
Image credits: Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Corbis