Today is Equal Pay Day (fitting after yesterday's Happiness Day: what goes up, must come down…).
The OECD recently published data that confirms a long trend: women earn around 15% less pay for doing the same work that men do. In Germany, this gap is the highest, at 22%.
I'm a person who doesn't work well with abstract numbers, and even if you break the percentage down into euro-figures, it doesn't mean that much to me. It's less, whichever way you portray it.
But today's paper (SZ) has a fascinating graph, which illustrates the case through "more". Taking the 22%, the paper shows have many MORE DAYS a woman would have to work per year, in order to earn what a man earns. In Germany, whereas men in the calendar year 2013 stopped working on December 31st, women work until today: March 21st. In other words, they work 365 days in 2013, and 80 days in 2014, just to earn the same income as men did in 2013.
No wonder many of us women feel like we're constantly running a marathon. We're not only working more (if you include unpaid work), we're also running simply to catch up with someone who is walking - or has sat down with a newspaper 80 days ago.
(It's not simply men's fault - I'm aware of this. Apologies for simplifying. But it's just such a wonderful image. Wonderfully terrifying and depressing.)
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