Worldwide, on average, women receive 20.5% less in their monthly wages compared to what men earn, in Costa Rica the figure drops to 7.8%. That places it among the countries in the region with the lowest gender pay gap, according to the Global Wage Report 2018-2019 of the International Labor Organization (ILO).
The study analyzes the difference in remuneration between men and women in some 73 countries and includes them into four groups depending on their income: high, medium-high, medium-low and low.
In the case of Costa Rica, it places it among upper-middle-income countries, in which a woman’s wages are on average 19.2% lower than those of men. In that group, only Ecuador has a smaller gap with 1.8%.
A marked difference
With the widest gap in Latin America is Argentina, which is grouped into high-income nations.
Their gender pay gap exceeds the world average at 25%, but is 0.5% lower than the average in those countries. In addition, it is the second widest gap in the continent, since it is only surpassed by Canada (which reports differences of 35.6%).
In Latin America, Uruguay and Chile follow (with gaps of 23% and 21.6%, respectively). In the world, among the countries with the widest gaps are Korea, Estonia and the United Kingdom, which exceed the world average. In those countries women earn 32.5%; 23.8% and 23.2% less than men.
For its part, El Salvador has a gap of 4.6% and is the only country in the region taken into account in lower middle income, where the average percentage of salary difference by gender is 15.8%.
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