- According to the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, the median gender pay gap for full and part-time workers in 2016 was 18.1%. The gap for full-time employees only was smaller at 9.4%. While part-time women tended to earn slightly more than part-time men (6%), part-time women earned 36.5% less than full-time men. Women are much more likely to work part time than men.
- Based on the analysis of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data – the source for all of the analysis in this report - the mean gender pay gap has reduced considerably. As a percentage of male earnings, for full and part-time work, it fell from 27% in 1993 to 10% in 2014.
- The gender pay gap is a longstanding phenomenon and its causes are complex. Social pressures and norms influence gender roles and often shape the types of occupations and career paths which men and women follow, and therefore their level of pay. Women are also more likely than men to work part-time and to take time out from their careers for family reasons.
- The effect of ‘occupational segregation’ – the division of men and women into different occupations – on pay has lessened. However, within occupations, on average women are still paid less than men suggesting they are either being paid less for doing broadly the same work or they have lower level jobs in the same company
- Women not only earn less than men overall, they are more likely to be low paid. In 2014, 20.4% of men earned less than £8 per hour while 30.3% of women did so. However, the proportion of women experiencing low pay has declined over time.
- Nearly two-fifths of women in employment are part-time and four times as many women as men work part-time. Male and female part-time workers generally earn less per hour than full-time workers, but women who work part-time generally earn more than men who do so.
- The pay gap widens with age: older women experience a larger pay gap compared with their male peers than younger women with their male peers. This is primarily because women are more likely than men to take time out of the labour market to care for children. This may slow career development. The statistical analysis found that women's shorter job tenure, a likely consequence of starting a family, is a factor driving the pay gap.
- While younger married women earn more than unmarried women, this advantage reverses with age. From their 40s onwards, married women experience a pay disadvantage compared to unmarried women. This is likely to be linked with child-rearing: the analysis found that having a child increases the pay gap considerably for women. Married men, by contrast, earn substantially more than unmarried men in all age groups. The ‘wage penalty’ for child-rearing, as a proportion of women’s pay, has increased slightly over time. However, as with the gender pay gap generally, the pay gap between men and women with children has also declined over time.
- There appears to be a relationship between housework and the pay gap. Across the whole sample, women do more housework than men, and the demands of housework do not affect women and men in the same way. Where women work fewer hours they do more housework but men do not vary their housework hours relative to hours worked – their contribution tends to remain low regardless. Women that do the largest amounts of housework experience a pay gap even when compared with the small number of men who also do a lot of housework.
Gender role theory
Differential gender roles are adopted early on in life and influence much of what happens in the home, school, personal relationships, family life and employment (see, for example: Lips, 2012; Ochsenfeld, 2014; Rubery, 2008). Therefore men and women often follow different paths in education and employment, which lead to overall differences in pay. Segregation into traditional gender roles is often not a conscious 'choice' for either women or men. Rather, these choices are constrained by social pressures and expectations, and are passed on from one generation to the next.
Occupational segregation
Occupations that have high proportions of women working in them are often referred to as 'feminised'. It has been found that the higher the proportion of women who work in an occupation the lower the average pay within it (Blau and Kahn, 2003; Bettio and Verashchagina, 2009; Levanon et al., 2009). Both men and women within feminised occupations experience lower pay, although because women obviously outnumber men they are disproportionately affected.
In the UK, Olsen et al. (2010) attribute 17% of the pay gap to occupational segregation by gender. Other research on the combined effects of occupational segregation and segregation within the workplace (that is, men and women performing different roles in the same workplace) finds a larger gap (Mumford and Smith, 2009), though in this case segregation is more important for the part-time than for the full-time gender pay gap.
Segregation, however, is difficult to analyse because of different datasets and definitions, while its effects are difficult to interpret because segregation is the result of both supply (men and women tending to gravitate to different types of jobs) and demand (for example, employers’ prejudices may act as a barrier). Explanations for occupational segregation often include the gender role argument described above, but other factors might include family constraints that, for instance, encourage entry into part-time work, which mostly occurs in more routine occupations.
It is also unclear why average pay is lower in more feminised occupations. It might be that women are paid less (for whatever reason), and that when they segregate into specific occupations, average wages in these must by definition be lower. However, both men and women who work in feminised occupations are paid less on average than those in non-feminised ones. It is possible of course that family and social pressures cause women to enter into low-paid occupations as a second-best option. This would mean more women than men ending up in low-paid occupations and could help explain why feminised occupations tend not to pay well.
Insofar as segregation is a problem, desegregation would seem to be the answer. However, research in the United States found that the effect of desegregation on equality is complex and inconclusive (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey, 2012). Further evidence from the US shows that occupational gender segregation is in decline (Hegewisch et al., 2010; Olsen et al., 2010, b; American Association of University Women, 2012), as is the gender pay gap, but the relationship between the two may also be weakening (Charles and Grusky, 2004). The effects of segregation are not consistently negative for women. Highly skilled women, for example, are sometimes very well paid in highly feminised occupations. This would mainly seem to be the result of women entering highly professionalised public sector work, often at management level, for instance in social work (Esping-Andersen, 1993; Brynin and Perales, 2016).
Whatever the exact cause of occupational segregation, it is clear that women tend to be over-represented in the following low-paid jobs (the ‘five Cs’): cleaner, caterer, carer, cashier, and clerical worker (Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff (JNCHES), 2011; Grimshaw and Rubery, 2007). This concentration of women in jobs which do not require significant, if any, qualifications, and which are often part-time, lowers women’s average pay relative to men’s.
Undervaluation theory
The persistence of the gender pay gap suggests the possibility of a stigma associated with occupational feminisation – that work done by women is socially and economically undervalued. This theory is most prevalent in the United States (see, for example: England, 1992, 2005, 2010) though it is also supported in the UK (for example Perales, 2013). The theory posits that society undervalues certain types of work precisely because women do it.
Pay practices are ‘socially constructed’ and lead to undervaluation of women’s labour in a range of ways – pay is heavily influenced by social pressures and norms, as well as by the actions of employers, governments and trade unions. Pay is often decided based on typically male behaviours such as performing long hours, working continuously for a long time and an aggressive negotiating style. By not conforming to these norms, some women lose out. On the other hand, women are still seen by society as secondary earners, as well as likely to derive more intrinsic reward from their work than men, thereby justifying lower salaries (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2007).
Given the overall trend towards a narrowing of the gender pay gap, however, it could be that undervaluation theory is becoming less relevant (Jackson, 2008). The fact that the gender pay gap varies across different countries suggests devaluation is not universal or uniform (Bettio, 2002; Bettio and Verashchagina, 2009).
Further, many jobs in which women predominate are not stereotypically ‘feminine’ – for instance, clerical work (Hakim, 1998) – and gender-integrated occupations are generally better paid than both female-dominated and male-dominated occupations (Hakim, 1998; Cotter et al., 2004; Magnusson, 2013). It also seems to be the case that women have gained in wage terms from working in skilled occupations and that there is an underlying trend in productivity in favour of women who are benefitting from the shift to a skills-based, non-manual economy (Brynin and Perales, 2016). This also undermines the theory in general but it remains possible, Brynin and Perales argue, that the work of less qualified women is undervalued. In sum, proving the empirical validity of undervaluation (or devaluation) theory has not been easy. Insofar as the theory is correct, however, the solution is to assess the comparative worth of feminised against less feminised occupations.
Finally, the pursuit of parity in gender pay has proven to be highly complex and has been described as a ‘case of constantly moving goalposts’ (Rubery and Grimshaw, 2014). The authors argue that pay setting is linked with wider societal and economic trends, such as the growing disparity in wealth and the waning influence of trade unions. ‘Levelling down,’ whereby men’s pay is reduced by employers to the same level as women’s, may reduce gender pay inequality but polarise incomes as a whole. In this scenario, those on low and middle incomes experience wage stagnation while those on high incomes have much faster wage growth.
Measuring and explaing the gender pay gap
The differences between the pay of men and women in employment have been examined in detail in many countries for a number of years. A general consensus exists as to the size of the UK gender pay gap, the direction of travel and the main factors contributing to it.
The Annual Survey of Household Earnings (ASHE) is a key source of data on the gender pay gap. Its findings are based on a 1% sample of employee jobs taken from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Pay As You Earn (PAYE) records; it does not cover the self-employed. The median, full-time gender pay gap decreased from 9.6% in 2014 to 9.4% in April 2015. This is the lowest since the survey began in 1997, although the gap has not changed very much in recent years. Including part-time employees in the overall analysis, the pay gap in 2015 stood at 19.2%, the same as in 2014. Comparing the pay of part-time men with part-time women, women have a pay advantage of 6.5% in 2015, up from 5.5% the year before (ONS, 2015).
A previous Commission report (Perfect, 2013) found that, based on ASHE data, the median, full-time gender pay gap had fallen from 17% in 1997 to 10% in 2010.
An earlier Commission report (Metcalf, 2009) reviewed various studies based on different datasets covering the late 1990s to the early 2000s. These gave an unadjusted pay gap of around 20%-25%, but in one instance this was as low as 14% and in another as high as 42%. This raw pay gap is the simple difference between average male and female wages and does not therefore control for other factors. When controlling for factors such as the average education of men and women or the proportion in part-time work, the gap falls to around 10% in most cases. This residual gap could be due to discrimination but also arises out of unexplained factors (information not available in the data).
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