WOMEN earn less than two-third of the compensation received by men in similar jobs.

An executive opinion survey conducted by the World Economic Forum between January and May 2013 showed that the wage equality between women and men returned a ratio of 0.64 for female-over-male for similar work.

What’s more, the organisation’s recent Global Gender Gap report, which was published last week, estimated that earned income for women was US$5,338 (using purchasing power parity, or PPP) on average compared to US$8,882 for men — translating to 60 per cent of male income.

Jamaica did rank high on the index — 47th of 136 — that ranks countries according to their proximity to gender equality rather than to women’s empowerment and measure gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities.

The high proportion of legislators, senior officials and managers that are female, the level of educational attainment, health and life expectancy relative to men pushed it up the list.

But in terms of wage equality, Jamaica was ranked better than most of its regional counterparts, but below Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana, and was in the bottom half globally.

That’s not to say that any of the countries had perfect wage equality among genders — Malaysia had the highest female-to-male ratio at 0.81 — or that developed nations were much better off. In the US, the same ratio sugests that women are paid 67 per cent of men’s earnings for similar jobs, while France was ranked 129th in the world, with a ratio of 0.45.

“Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen indicators has declined, rather than whether women are “winning” the “battle of the sexes”,” wrote the authors of the Global Gender Report for 2013.

The overall score of the Latin America region improved by six per cent between 2006 and 2013.

This is mainly due to improvements in the economic participation and opportunity and political empowerment subindexes.

“The Latin America and Caribbean region, which has closed 70 per cent of its overall gender gap in 2013, is showing the biggest improvements from last year compared to the other regions,” according to the report. “The region ranks fourth on the economic participation and opportunity subindex, having closed 63 per cent of its gender gap.”

Thirteen countries from the region have fully closed their health and survival gender gap, nine are part of the top 20 countries on the literacy rate indicator and eight are in the top 20 on the enrolment in secondary education indicator.