The gender wage gap, at a global scale, is placed at 19%
01/03/2019
On Friday 1 March, at the UAB's Faculty of Law, the presentation of the 6th Global Wage Report, focusing this year on the wage inequality between men and women, took place. The conference has been given by Ms Rosalía Vázquez-Álvarez, expert from the ILO and one of the main authors ofthe report. The session was presented and moderated by Dr Eduardo Rojo, Professor by Labour Law and Social Security. At the end there was a roundtable with Ms Eva Gajardo from UGT, Ms Lidia Sandalinas from CCOO, Ms Maria Àngels Pujols, from the Council of Labour Relations, Ms Ana Macho, from FEPIME, and Ms Laia Grabulosa, from Confederació-Associació Empresarial del Tercer Sector Social de Catalunya. The roundtable was presented and moderated by Dr Pilar Carrasquer. This event is coordinated by the dean of the Faculty, Dr Esther Zapater, and by the lecturer of History of Law, Dr Maria Jesús Espuny.
Gender wage gap
The elimination of the gender wage gap is one of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDG) by the UN part of Goal 8, referring to a decent work for everybody. For the ILO this goal includes as a priority subject "to achieve equal pay for work of equal value" (goal 8.5 of SDG 8).
One of the main problems that arise when we talk about gender wage gap is the disparity of criteria when measuring this inequality. For example, there are observable differences in the results depending on wether they are based on the average or the median, the two most frequent systems used to measure the wage gap, or on wether they use the salaries per hour or per month. The SDG include as an indicator recommended by the ONU the comparison of the average wage per hour of men and women. Following this methodology, a gender wage gap of 16% at a global scalecan be established, with big variations between countries.
One of the changes in the report is the proposal of a methodology analysing the wage gap by factors, to smooth out the internal differences of the "man" and "woman" groups by creating more homogeneous groups. With this methodology the obtained result is a 19% of wage gap at a global scale. The four factors taken into consideration when analysing the wage gap are: age, educational level, type of contract and the belonging to the public or private sector. This would be the explained part of the wage gap.
There is a part of the wage gap, however, that cannot be explained by the different characteristics of men and women. The explanation behind this wage gap can be found in three elements. On the one hand, the wage discriminationor, in other words, a minor remuneration for the same work. Another part of the explanation is the undervaluation of the feminized occupations, usually associated to domestic or reproductive tasks. The report shows how wages, both for women andfor men, tend to be lower in companies which have a more feminized team than those which do not have it, although they present similarities regarding the size, the sector and the agreement. Even if the index of productivity is applied, the wages continue to be lower in companies with a feminized team regardless of presenting high levels of productivity. Finally, the report studies the wage gap due to motherhood, which shows the differences in remuneration between women with children and women without children, stemming from the difficult balance between family and work life, as well as the penalty of the careers of women with children.
In Spain, it is possible to observe much more evidently the global trend in wages collected by the report: while there is a growth of 12 percentile points in productivity and an increase in living cost, salaries have dropped by 1.8% in relation to prices and remain stagnated at levels from 2008.
What can we do to reduce the gender wage gap?
The Global Wage Report 2019 includes a series of recommendations addressed mostly to public bodies with the goal of getting rid of the gender wage gap in 2030, according to the SDG by the United Nations. Although the response depends on the specificity of each country or region, we can point out four big areas of action:
1) To improve salary policies (such as increasing the minimum guaranteed interprofessional wage) to facilitate the introduction of gender clauses in collective agreements.
2) To boost especific policies in the labour market such as the promotion of the regulation of underground economy.
3) To promote a law on wage transparencyto give visibility and fight wage discriminations in companies.
4) To diversify the market, because the more diverse and heterogeneous a company team is, the better the position of women in the sector is.