Gender Wage Gap: Gender Discrimination In The Workforce

Gender wage gap: Gender discrimination in the workforce

‘Achieving gender equality requires the engagement of women and men, girls and boys. It is everyone's responsibility.’ – Ban Ki Moon, Secretary-General of United Nations.
Gender wage gap, also known as male-female income difference, is the dissimilarities between male and female earnings. It is equated as a percentage of male earnings. Normally, the wage gap is measured using full-time weekly earnings before tax without taking external aspects into account such as overtime. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) expressed it as the average difference between men’s and women’s hourly earnings. In general, it is believed that the pay gap is caused by multiple

With that being said, the full-time gender pay gap based on hourly earnings was 15.5 percent (100% minus 84.5%). Data showed that the wage slit was bigger when comparing weekly earnings. Men made 21.5% more than the women. However, this can be explained as men tends to work more hours per week compared to women. On average, a full-time men employee worked 40.4 hours whereas a women worked 37.4 hours. In terms of annual salary, the full-time gender wage gap was a whopping 26.1 percent. Besides that, part-time female employees only earned 65.5 percent of what male employees make, concluding that the part-time pay gap was 34.5 percent. These data was criticized as males and females both exhibit different characteristics that alter the outcome of wages. According to a study done by the United States Department of Labour (2009), it suggested that there are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for the difference in wages between the both sexes. . This wide gap does not justify the differences among men and women. For instance, males normally worked in a more professional field compared to females. But an analysis done by Hensvik (2014) using women in high-paying jobs and managerial positions in the same industry as an indicator to point out the gender labour market disparities shows that the gap is 13percent.

This is known as industrial segregation. Concentration of women in certain industries further extends the pay gap. A research conducted by Evelyn Murphy (2006), to prove how industrial segregation affects the gender pay gap, she compared two different industries, mining and retail. Mining, which is also the highest paying industry consist of only 14.5percent of women whereas in retail, one of the lowest paid industries accounts to 57percent of female employees. The pay gap would be able to narrow down if both sexes are employed fairly among