What drives the gender pay gap?

 

The gender pay gap is a product of numerous and interconnected factors, including: → Occupational segregation (vertical and horizontal): women are overrepresented in sectors and jobs that pay less and are underrepresented in management positions. Such segregation has numerous causes, including gender stereotypes in education and in the labour market, as well as imbalances in caring and household responsibilities between women and men that may lead women to seek occupational niches where hours are shorter or more flexible.

While progress towards achieving gender equality in education has been made, major discrepancies still exist, especially when it comes to access to digital skills training. Women’s access to higher education and training in STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields and the development of their digital skills remains problematic. Of the estimated 2.7bn people currently unconnected, the majority are women and girls. 

The digital gender gap continues to expand in many developing countries, creating a specific and urgent need to support digital gender equality. The tech workforce continues to be dominated by men, with women making up only 22% of AI professionals globally and the majority of technical and leadership roles still held by men. In STEM fields, women are promoted at a slower rate than men, with only 52 women being promoted to a managerial post for every 100 men. A shocking 22% of women in tech are considering leaving the workforce altogether given the prevailing masculine working culture, reflected in impediments to advancing and other barriers, including exposure to violence and harassment and lower wages. While data shows that both women and men are well paid in ICT, the gender pay gap persists. In the tech sector, data from the EU show that men are offered higher salaries than women for the same job title and attracting women to well-paid ICT and STEM jobs is seen as an important policy tool to reduce the gender pay gap.

→ Work-life balance deficiencies with gendered differences in the division of family responsibilities. The disproportionate higher share of unpaid care work assumed by women, often exacerbated by the lack of adequate policies such as affordable childcare services and adequate family leave arrangements, affects women’s opportunities to access and remain in secure and paid work, as well as their career progression and pay prospects. 

→ Gender discrimination, both direct (i.e., explicitly paying an employee less because of gender) as well as indirect (i.e., unconscious bias), remains a pervasive problem and a major contributor to the gender wage gap. It continues to be the largest factor behind the gender pay gap in many countries, accounting, for instance, for around 38 per cent of pay differentials in Australia. Intersectional discrimination further exacerbates the pay gap for women who are members of disadvantaged groups, such as migrant women, ethnic minority women, women with a disability, older women and women of colour. 

→ The gender wage gap has accordingly been shown to be particularly acute for parents, and many of the above drivers are particularly linked to having children or caring responsibilities. Several studies have documented the so-called ‘motherhood penalty’, Several studies have documented the so-called ‘motherhood penalty’, whereby mothers tend to earn less than non-mothers, as well as the ‘fatherhood bonus’, whereby men tend to earn more. This phenomenon is due in part to the fact that women are more likely to interrupt their careers to take care of children and old or sick relatives, leading to absences from the labour market, and are also more likely to return to part-time work compared to men. These gendered differences in the division of family responsibilities, often driven by socially gendered norms and the absence of adequate work-life balance policies, can in turn affect women’s career progression, their opportunities to access paid work and full employment, and their pay prospects, contributing to occupational segregation, as mentioned earlier, as well as discrimination on the basis of parenthood or potential parenthood.