Despite legislation mandating pay equality in the UK being 50 years old, women’s hourly pay is lower on average and, as shown in our research, expert opinions diverge as to why.
Some argue that different employment patterns reflect differences in preferences, while others that these differences reflect the constraints women face in the labour market, such as discrimination or societal expectations regarding gender roles.
These discriminatory practices can be further partitioned into
taste-based discrimination (an overt prejudice or japan rcs data dislike towards a particular group)
statistical discrimination (an inference about person’s qualities based on statistical characteristics of the group they belong to)
stereotyping (fixed ideas that representatives of certain group are better at certain tasks)
The comparison of pay across men and women is further obscured, because there are various systematic differences between them in terms of their human capital (i.e. experience and education). For example, women take time out of the labour market to look after children more often than men and, once they have children, they are more likely to return to part-time work, which means they accumulate less full-time and more part-time experience on average.
Figure 1 below shows the estimated gender pay differentials in selected UK studies published over the last 50 years – both raw and adjusted for differences in human capital.