Why Do Women Still Earn Less Than Men in 2025?
New data from the U.S., Brazil, and India shows that even as technology improves fairness on paper, women remain underpaid and undervalued across industries.
• Women in the U.S. earn 83 cents for every dollar men make, unchanged since 2024.
• In Brazil, women earn 19.4% less than men.
• In India, the gap ranges between 20% and 30%, depending on sector and education.
For decades, the gender pay gap has been treated as a problem that better policies, education, and technology would eventually fix. Yet the latest data shows that while we now measure pay inequality more precisely, we have not come much closer to closing it.
In the United States, Payscale’s 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report found that women earn 83 cents for every dollar earned by men. When adjusted for job title, education, and experience, that figure rises to 99 cents. On paper, that sounds like progress, but in reality, it hides a deeper imbalance. Men still occupy most of the highest-paying and most influential positions.
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This pay gap trend extends far beyond the U.S.
The same pattern appears across emerging and established markets. In Brazil, women earn about 19% less than men (via the country's Ministry of Labor), even after new pay-transparency laws were introduced in 2023 requiring large companies to report salary data twice a year. Men continue to dominate senior roles in industries such as finance and energy, while women remain concentrated in lower-paying areas like health, education, and care work.
Meanwhile, in India, we see that the divide is even sharper. Women earn between 20 and 30% less than men, depending on their sector and education level. Many are employed in informal or part-time work that isn’t officially recorded, which means the real gap is likely wider. Even in the country’s fast-growing tech sector, women make up less than one-third of the workforce and are rarely represented at executive level.
Across all three regions, the numbers point to the same conclusion. Policy can promote transparency, but it cannot create opportunity.
Why technology and policy haven’t closed the gender pay gap
The gender pay gap doesn’t persist because women are less capable. It exists because the structure of work still rewards availability over ability. Across sectors, women are overrepresented in lower-paid roles, often tied to care, teaching, or administration, while men dominate leadership and technical fields where pay grows faster.
Motherhood also deepens that divide. Studies show that women’s income typically drops or stagnates after having children, while men often earn more—a pattern known as the “fatherhood premium.” In Brazil, women who are parents earn roughly 25% less than male parents. In India, social expectations around unpaid care work push many women out of full-time employment altogether.
Technology was expected to fix this, but it has mostly mirrored the same old biases in a digital form. Algorithms were meant to make hiring fairer, remote work was meant to improve flexibility, and pay-transparency laws were meant to expose discrimination. Instead, these tools have revealed how deeply inequality is built into modern systems.
AI hiring models often learn from biased historical data, which reinforces existing hierarchies rather than dismantling them. Remote work has made some jobs more accessible but also less visible. According to Payscale, women who work entirely from home earn about 78 cents for every dollar that men in similar roles earn. Those in hybrid roles fare slightly better, suggesting that being seen still matters when it comes to career advancement.
Henry Chikwem
The cost of inequality
The World Bank estimates that closing gender pay gaps could increase global GDP by more than 20%. The economic case is clear, but the cultural and creative costs are just as significant. When women are excluded from decision-making or paid less for equal work, industries lose diversity of thought and innovation slows.
For the technology industry, the effects are especially visible. Algorithms trained on biased pay data keep replicating inequities, and companies that claim to champion inclusion rarely publish pay-equity audits or link leadership performance to fairness goals. Without transparency, inequality quietly becomes part of the system itself.
Fair pay is not just a moral issue, but is also aperformance issue. Companies that treat equity as a shared responsibility, measured and reviewed as rigorously as financial results, are better positioned to retain top talent and build trust with employees and users alike.
Women are already leading innovation across sectors, from fintech founders in Lagos to AI engineers in Bangalore. Yet their work is still undervalued. The gender pay gap is more than a statistic—it is a mirror reflecting what societies choose to reward. Closing it will require more than technology or legislation. It will take leadership that sees fairness as the foundation for progress, not a side effect of it.
Oyinebiladou Omemu
