At This Rate, Women Won't Make As Much As Men For At Least 75 Years

[sheshe2]

Working women likely won’t have pay equality with men in their lifetimes. Neither will their daughters.

That’s one of the many depressing findings in a report out Monday from Oxfam on the state of gender equality around the world. If the gap between men's and women's earnings keeps closing at its current, agonizingly slow rate, women won’t earn equal pay for equal work for another 75 years, the report found.

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There are many reasons why closing the pay gap is happening so slowly. For one, out-and-out discrimination still plays a role. And in many countries, including the U.S., women tend to be concentrated in low-wage industries or in undervalued sectors like health care and education.

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One thing that could help is for policy makers to start thinking of unpaid care work as having a broad economic benefit, instead of just as a "women's issue." And they should: Such work, if recognized, would boost gross domestic product by 9 percent in the U.S. alone, according to Oxfam.

"Unpaid care work is what sustains families, what sustains communities and what sustains economies," Wakefield said. "It's basically a subsidy for the economy that's not recognized."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/15/gender-gap-oxfam_n_5585225.html