Study finds gender pay gap 'is real,' these professions suffer most

Glassdoor ran the study, which analyzed the salaries of over 500,000 full-time workers in five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and France. It found that, on average, women in America make 76 cents to every dollar a man makes.

"A very common misperception is that there is no gap once you compare apples and apples," Glassdoor chief economist Andrew Chamberlain told CBS News. "We are able to compare people on really detailed characteristics -- the same age, the same education, the same years of experience, working in same state and their titles and employers. And even when we control for that, you see a 5.4 percent gap between men and women."

CBS News added that the top five jobs with the biggest gender pay gaps are computer programming, chef, dentist, anyone in a company's executive office and psychologist. Chamberlain told CBS News that computer programming is "heavily dominated by men." "As a general rule, fields where professions are mostly men, we see bigger gaps," he added.

Women chefs “earn about 28.1 percent less than men” with a salary of $46,000, Glassdoor added. The study also found that women 55 to 65 years old face the largest pay gap at 10.5 percent while women 18 to 24 earn only 2.2 percent less than their male counterparts.

The biggest cause of the pay gap is often not discrimination or workplace fairness issues, but occupation and industry sorting of men and women into different jobs with unequal pay, Glassdoor concluded.

It added that policies that embrace salary transparency often help balance out pay gaps in the workplace.

Read more at Glassdoor and CBS News.