Breaching the gender gap

By Julia Laplane, OECD. Today, financial literacy is a pre-requisite to participating in economic activities. Yet, this new OECD report shows there are clear gender inequalities when it comes to understanding where your money goes and what potential risks you are taking: almost 60% of women in Poland do not know that high investment returns are accompanied by high risk, against 45% of men. And only 49% of women in the United Kingdom know how compound interest works, compared with 75% of men. 
Financial education is only one dimension in which gender gaps can be found. Take differences in salaries: although the gender wage gap decreased by nearly 4 percentage points between 2000 and 2005, there has been limited progress since and women still earn on average 16% less than men in OECD countries. Read more...