Today, International Women’s Day 2012, marks a disappointing statistic: Worldwide, women are paid 18 percent on average less than their male counterparts at work. This startling fact comes from a new report released yesterday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

"Frozen in Time: Gender Pay Gap Unchanged for 10 Years," looks at women's wages in 43 countries.

Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the ITUC remarked:

For the last decade we have seen women's wages hitting a road block. The pay gap remains frozen in time almost everywhere.

The labor movement can make a difference however; as Burrow noted that:

More unionized sectors such as the public sector tend to have lower pay gaps. Part of the problem is that many workers are not paid a decent minimum wage.

In the United States, the gender pay gap shrank dramatically from 38.7 percent in 1970 to below 19 percent in 2005. Since then, the pay gap between men and women has inched back up in recent years, to nearly 20 percent, larger than the worldwide average.

And while men profit more from an education than women in many countries, in the United States the statistics are bleak: Male workers age 30 or younger who have a middle level education make 48 percent more than women, and male workers age 30 or younger with a high level of education earn 37 percent more than women with the same high education levels.

As Elizabeth Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, says:

The wage gap continues to be a problem for women workers, and even more for young women workers. Given the positive effect unionization has on wages, is more important now than ever, that young people, especially young women, have the opportunity to form unions.

The report is the third study into the gender wage gap by the ITUC, following up on studies in 2008 and 2009.

Read the full report here.