This Online Tool Compares Your Salary to the Global Average

Talking about your income is awkward at best and rude at worst—but knowing where you stack up is an important negotiation tool. Websites like Glassdoor allow you to anonymously compare your salary to others in the same or similar fields, but how does that compare to the national average? Or the average salaries of other countries? A calculator on the CNN Money website can now give you this valuable perspective.

A bar graph, which uses data from the International Labour Organization (ILO), shows the average pre-tax salaries for 18 countries side-by-side, making it easy to see the range. Graphics also show how your wages compare to other jobs around the world, like drivers in South Africa or cleaners in Thailand.

We entered a few random U.S. salaries to test out the tool and included screenshots of the results below. The tool shows that a salary of $10,000 (the third screenshot) is three times more than what an Ethiopian teacher earns, but only .0561 times the annual salary of the average American CEO. The results can be sobering, as they reveal not only the wage gap in the United States (should we repeat that CEO statistic?), but how even someone considered middle or lower class in the U.S. makes multiple times what some professionals make in other countries.

[h/t CNN Money]

Screenshots via CNN Money