One (of many) ways to measure the gender pay gap is to compare labour market earnings for women and men. This combines three sources of inequality: lower average hourly pay for women, fewer paid hours for working women, and fewer women in paid work...

...add these different factors together and the total gap can be pretty mind-blowing. In Japan (an extreme example among rich countries) men earn FOUR TIMES as much as women. (NB Total hours worked are quite similar; it's just that much of the work for women is unpaid.)

There are lots of ways to think about this, but economists such as @orianabandiera point out that it suggests a stark mis-allocation of labour...

...Lots of men who would be great stay-at-home Dads - or whip up a mean risotto - instead working long hours in the office.
Meanwhile lots of women who would be brilliant professionals, entrepreneurs, etc instead doing unpaid domestic work.

New work by @orianabandiera and colleagues attempts to quantify how much productivity is lost internationally as a result of this misallocation.

“If you equalised the barrier,” Professor @orianabandiera told me, “some men would move out of the labour force, some women would move in, and productivity would increase by 32 per cent.”

I try to make sense of it all in this week's @FinancialTimes column: www.ft.com/content/83751e6c-544c-4a16-851a-e05f18506afa

If you want to dig deeper, @LSEnews has launched a new Hub for Equal Representation in the Economy: www.hubequalrep.org/