There's still a pay gap, folks

You've come a long way, baby. But you've got 16% left to go.

That's the pay gap between working men and women worldwide, according to a new global report from the International Trade Union Confederation. It's worst in Asia. Here, from the Guardian:

The ITUC study showed women got paid 33.4 percent less then men in Japan, 31.5 percent less in South Korea and 32.7 percent less in China.

You think Americans must take the lead? You think wrong:

In the United States wages of female workers were lower than those of their male counterparts by 22.4 percent, in Canada the difference reached 27.5 percent and in Paraguay 31.3 percent.

How, in this day and age, does this still happen? That's one topic I'm hoping Susan Pinker gets to the bottom of in her new book, The Sexual Paradox. I've just started reading it. Pinker is a psychologist, and her book focuses on another sort of gap: that between the tremendous and undeniable achievement of girls in school, and their failure to achieve in the workplace. Of course, that brings up questions of how we define success, which is also something she tackles.

By the way, know where women earn the most—or, at least, whose wages track men's most closely? Europe. There the average pay gap is 14.5%, according to the report, and has been shrinking over the last 10 years. We 'mericans have some catching up to do.