Breathe
By Sonia Garza González
Equal pay continues to represent a major challenge in all regions of the world. Despite significant advances in women's education and participation in the labor market, progress in closing the gender wage gap has been too slow. At this rate, UN Women warns that it will take nearly 300 years to reach economic gender parity, clearly reflecting serious social and economic risks.
The technical arguments refer that this indicator -wage gap- measures the difference between men's and women's average earnings, as a percentage of men's earnings. In general, characteristics such as educational level, qualifications, work experience, occupational category and hours worked represent the "explained" part of the pay gap between women and men. The remaining and more significant part, i.e., the "unexplained" part, is attributable to discrimination, intentional or not, pervasive in the workplace.
A stark illustration of this gap can be seen in the United States: for every dollar earned by white men, black women earn only 63.7 cents, indigenous women 59 cents and Latinas 57 cents. This situation explains the urgency of combating this problem, given the danger of perpetuating cycles of poverty from one generation to the next.
