The Idea Department

theweekmagazine:

That’s the amount of money the gender pay gap ads up to over a 40-year career. In other words, over 40 years, women make nearly three-quarters of a million dollars less than their male counterparts.

Other numbers:

• 80 
  Percent of the average man’s salary that his female counterpart makes one year out of college. “The gap between men’s and women’s salaries begins immediately upon entering the workforce,” says Sarah Green in the Harvard Business Review.

• 15.7
  Percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies held by women in 2010. That’s “an inexplicable statistic given the number of available qualified female candidates,” say Douglas A. McIntyre, Michael B. Sauter, and Ashley C. Allen in The Atlantic.

• $0.77
  Amount full-time female employees are paid for every dollar their male counterparts make, according to census data

• $0.59
  Amount full-time female employees were paid in 1970 for every dollar their male counterparts make. “Forty years and 18 cents,” says Marlo Thomas in The Huffington Post. “A dozen eggs has gone up 10 times that amount.”