About the Gender Pay Gap Calculator
This tool computes the unadjusted (raw) gender pay gap — the standard, widely reported statistic used by agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Eurostat. It compares aggregate average or median earnings for two groups and expresses the difference as a percentage of men's earnings. It does not attempt to explain the gap by controlling for occupation, hours worked, seniority, or education — that is a separate calculation called the adjusted or controlled gap, usually produced with regression analysis.
The formula
Given average (or median) annual earnings for men (M) and women (W), the raw gender pay gap is:
- Pay gap (%) = (M − W) ÷ M × 100 — the shortfall expressed as a share of men's earnings. This is the convention used by Eurostat and the U.S. Census Bureau.
- Earnings ratio (cents on the dollar) = W ÷ M × 100 — the flip side of the same comparison, often phrased as "women earn X cents for every dollar men earn." The gap percentage and the ratio always sum to 100.
- Annual dollar gap = M − W — the plain dollar difference for one year at the earnings levels entered.
- Career-long gap (estimate) = Annual dollar gap × years worked — a simplified, non-compounding projection that holds both earnings figures flat for the number of years entered. It ignores raises, promotions, inflation, and time out of the workforce, so treat it as an order-of-magnitude illustration, not a forecast.
If you enter figures as an hourly wage rather than an annual salary, the calculator converts to an annual-equivalent using a standard convention of 2,080 hours per year (40 hours a week × 52 weeks) before computing the dollar-based results; the percentage gap and the cents-on-the-dollar ratio are the same either way, since the hourly-to-annual conversion cancels out in a ratio.
Raw gap versus adjusted gap
The raw gap answers "how do the two aggregate figures compare?" It is easy to compute and easy to misread. Two organizations, industries, or countries can have identical raw gaps for very different reasons — one because men and women in the same roles are paid differently, another because women are concentrated in lower-paid occupations or work fewer hours on average. The adjusted gap tries to separate those explanations by holding role, hours, tenure, and other factors constant, typically via a regression model. This calculator only produces the raw figure; pair it with an adjusted analysis before drawing conclusions about pay discrimination specifically.
Choosing mean or median earnings
Either can be entered here, but they tell slightly different stories. The mean (average) is pulled upward by a small number of very high earners, so a workplace with a few highly paid executives can show a larger mean-based gap than its typical employees experience. The median — the middle value when earnings are sorted — is less sensitive to those outliers and is often preferred for headline reporting. Whichever you use, compare like with like: do not mix a mean for one group with a median for the other.