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Gender Related Wage Gap Analysis

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The most cited measures of the gender related wage gap are the mean and the median ratio of women/men hourly wage. In particular, it has been pointed out in many works that the median gap decreased from 17% to 9.4% in 1997-2014 . The first issue is that those represents aggregated values and as pointed out by Shackleton (2005), it is not possible to talk about a single wage gap. The Office of National Statistics uses as unit the hourly pay excluding overtime, because on average men work more hours per week than women and are more likely to work overtime. Given the existence of a part-time penalty for both men and women, on average women tend to be less penalised. The key is in the different age population, part-time male workers are mostly likely to be students or …show more content…

The mean full-time pay gap in the private sector is much higher (22.3 per cent) than that in the public sector (13.6 per cent). The concentration in the public sector pay scale seems to be an important factor for the observed difference. In fact the low pay trends in the public tend to be well above the minimum wage, but top executive and managerial positions are payed modestly if compared with leading multinational companies. Companies’ size is influential, in fact the wage gap tends to be smaller in companies with 25 or less employees. Marital status has a consistent impact on women’s wage, however the extent differs from country to country. In the UK, single women on average earn 90% of what men earn, as for married women the ratio drops to a 60% to 70% (Harkmess and Waldfogel, 2003). Some of the penalties may be due to differences in the occupations of women with children and women without children and to the facility of finding a work place child friendly and closer home, which are factor which have to be taken into consideration when applying to a position.

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