The gender pay gap: myth or reality?

Is there discrimination in wages between men and women, despite all the international treaties and regulations? What are the causes of the wage gap?

In the struggle for equal full between men and women, one of the handiest pointing dictum is that they “earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men”. However, despite the common phrase, this concept and its implications is little understood in everyday, and part of this misunderstanding could be caused just by the way in which it arises.

The most common response I’ve heard about the alleged “absence” of the gender pay gap, it is someone who states that in your office, women and men earn the same pay for the same work, and would be very strange if the human resources offices try to deduct a woman 30% of his salary for being a woman. But this is a misrepresentation of what the gender pay gap. This, as defined by the OECD, is the difference between the gain of men and women on account of their work, expressed as a percentage of men’s wages: this is, is a population average, not an absolute number applicable to each case.

What circumstances cause the gender pay gap?

The gap, therefore, varies according to the professional field: women medicine earn 71% of the salary of their male colleagues, while in the case of lawyers and judges, the figure is 82%. The jobs that value more the work overtime, as medicine and surgery-tend to have wider gaps, as the disproportionate allocation of responsibilities in the home makes women, as a group, are less willing to work Overtime regularly. We’re not talking about the payment of overtime in themselves, but the disproportionate increase of individual cost of those times.

On the other hand, women tend to be incorporated into more professions and areas lowest paid, and pursue careers that lead to this type of work (this is one of the causes behind the campaigns to get more women enter the fields of science and technology). While this is not a form of discrimination directly by employers, itself is a result of a. structural discrimination that leads to the way girls are educated from an early age

In addition to this, the pay gap increases with the course of the career of a woman: for women 15 years of career, the gap reaches 40%, due, among other things, professional interruptions due to pregnancy and parenting in general absent in the career of their male peers.

Consequences the gender pay gap

As a result of the gender pay gap, women have lot more likely than men of falling into poverty in old age, because pensions, which are usually proportional to wages, are lower. For countries, the reduction of the wage gap would imply a proportional increase in gross domestic product, thus stimulating economic growth.

The gap, then, is the result of several factors, and lot more complex than just imagine cutting a specific head of the check of an employee only as a woman. The decisions taken by employers in allocating resources, hiring and promoting staff and design internal policies have much to do, but also the decisions taken by women throughout their careers or not-because of social pressure and ‘own constructions genre expectations play a key role in this dispute. Many of these factors could be corrected through changes in public policy, but others are the result of cultural constructs, and as such, take many more years to be modified.