scholarly journals Gender pay gap in salary bands among employees in the formal sector of South Africa

Author(s):  
Adeboye M. Adelekan ◽  
Mark H.R. Bussin

Orientation: The gender pay gap is a worldwide challenge that has persisted despite political will and interventions. Comparably qualified women performing similar work as men continue to earn less. There are conflicting views in the literature regarding the status of the gender pay gap.Research purpose: The purpose of the study was to determine status of the gender pay gap among employees in the same salary band and to establish whether men and women receive similar pay for similar work in the study population.Motivation for study: The status of the gender pay gap would establish the progress made towards closing the gap and guide necessary adjustments to interventions.Research approach/design and method: A quantitative analysis was conducted on the pay information of 217 902 employees collected in a survey from over 700 companies, across 10 job families and 6 industries.Main findings: Men’s pay was consistently higher than that of women in all salary bands except at the 75th and 95th percentile in sub-bands B-lower and B-upper and 25th percentile in sub-band E-upper. The gender pay gap ranged from 8% in band A to 27.1% in sub-band F-upper. The gaps observed in the salary bands were statistically significant (p < 0.0001) except in sub-band E-upper, F-lower and F-upper, indicating convergence towards similar pay for similar work at senior to top management levels. Women were under-represented in all salary bands with the lowest presence in band F, especially sub-band F-upper. Gender, race, job family and industry have a significant effect on income earned in the study sample.Practical/managerial implications: Government’s efforts seemed to have produced minimal results as women are represented in all job families, industries and salary bands. The pay of men and women in senior and top management levels was similar. However, more still needs to be done to achieve the 50% target representation of women in senior management and close the gap at all levels.Contribution/value-add: The number of women at management levels is still very low when compared to their male counterparts. However, the gender pay gap in senior to top management positions are converging towards similar pay for work of similar value.

Author(s):  
Oana Ancuţa Stângaciu

The actions taken for the promotion of the equality of opportunity between men and women and for eliminating the direct or the indirect discrimination apply to the field of employment as well as to the field of education, health, culture, information and the participation in the decision making process. Starting from one of the objectives of the Strategy for the equality of opportunity, being aware of the real situation of women participation compared to men participation to the economical and social life, this analysis offers a perspective on the equality of opportunity between men and women in the field of employment, seen based on the statistical data. Thus, in order to quantify this phenomenon using methods specific to the statistical analysis, we used the gender pay gap indicator pertaining to the EU member states per total economy, as well as per economical activities, and the research results show that on the EU level there are still significant gender pay gaps.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 19066
Author(s):  
Olga Kalogeraki ◽  
Dimitrios Georgakakis ◽  
Winfried Ruigrok

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Kinnear ◽  
Karen Ortlepp

Orientation: This paper represents a broader study which explores how South African women business leaders construct power in their life and leadership narratives. The research was approached with a feminist paradigm in its review of constructions of power and their potential for transformation of patriarchal power dynamics.Research purpose: The purpose was to critically analyse emerging models of power among South African women business leaders to include their perspectives in the process of theory building.Motivation for the study: Women in senior leadership positions are not necessarily enabling the transformation of organisations to include greater representation of women at senior levels. A critical understanding of women’s models of power may highlight unconscious processes contributing to this as well as emerging models that can facilitate change.Research design, approach and method: Qualitative research was conducted within a feminist social constructionist framework, using the method of discourse analysis of narrative texts to identify emerging models of power. The 10 women in the study included executives within corporations across a range of industry sectors in South Africa.Practical/managerial implications: The findings may guide approaches to gender transformation efforts in organisations and raise women leaders’ awareness of their conscious and unconscious impact on gender empowerment.Contribution/value-add: A novel contribution of this study is the emerging transformative model of power and the tensions women experience in asserting this power.


Equilibrium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Joanna Landmesser

Research background: Recently there has been an increase in interest in the studies of income inequalities. The findings of numerous empirical studies show that males earn higher wages than females. A variety of techniques of income inequalities decomposition are becoming popular. New procedures go far beyond the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. They allow to study differences of income distributions for various groups of people and to decompose them at various quantile points. Purpose of the article: The aim of the paper is to compare personal income distributions in selected countries of the European Union, taking into account gender differences. Methods: First, we examined the income inequalities between men and women in each country using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition procedure. The unexplained part of the gender pay gap gave us information about the wage discrimination. Second, we extended the decomposition procedure to different quantile points along the whole income distribution. To describe differences between the incomes of men and women, we constructed the so-called counterfactual distribution, which is a mixture of a conditional distribution of the dependent variable (income) and a distribution of the explanatory variables (individual people’s characteristics). Then, we utilized the residual imputation approach (JMP-approach). Findings & Value added: In the article data from EU-SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) were used. We found that there exists an important diversity in the size of the gender pay gap across members of the European Union. The results obtained for these countries allowed us to group them into clusters. In general, there are two types of countries in Europe: the countries, where the bulk of the observed income differences cannot be explained by observed characteristics, and the countries, where the explained and the unexplained effects are both positive, with even a bigger explained effect for the lower income ranges.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Delaney Arth

The gender pay gap has a long and well-documented history. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed in an attempt to combat this gap in wages between men and women, but as of 2019 women still on average earn less than 80% of what their male counterparts do. Countless factors contribute to this discrepancy, from gender norms to workplace culture to wage structure and so much more. Though there is a significant literature discussing the gender pay gap, the majority of it focuses on external barriers to equality, including but not limited to institutional inequality, social norms, and workplace discrimination. Fewer scholars have addressed the internalized barriers to equality in the workplace that women face—such as how gendered norms and expectations may affect workplace behaviors such as negotiating compensation packages. My project employs qualitative content coding and individual breakdown of semi-structured, in-depth interviews to investigate if, how, and why women’s approaches to negotiation may contribute to pay inequity in professional positions. My findings confirm a discrepancy in rates of negotiation between male and female respondents. They also suggest that divergences in the circumstances surrounding negotiations as well as in approaches to negotiation exist between men and women, and among workers with various levels of seniority. Finally, my findings in combination with existing literature suggest a link between negotiation and the gender pay gap.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leib Litman ◽  
Jonathan Robinson ◽  
Zohn Rosen ◽  
Cheskie Rosenzweig ◽  
Josh Waxman ◽  
...  

Studies of the gender pay gap are seldom able to simultaneously account for the range of alternative putative mechanisms underlying it. Using CloudResearch, an online microtask platform connecting employers to workers who perform research-related tasks, we examine whether gender pay discrepancies are still evident in a labor market characterized by anonymity, relatively homogeneous work, and flexibility. For 22,271 Mechanical Turk workers who participated in nearly 5 million tasks we analyze hourly wages by gender, controlling for key covariates which have been shown previously to lead to differential pay for men and women. On average, women’s hourly earnings were 10.5% lower than men’s. Several factors contributed to the gender wage gap, including the tendency for women to select tasks that have lower advertised hourly pay. This study provides evidence that gender pay gaps can arise despite the absence of overt discrimination, labor segregation, and inflexible work arrangements, even after experience, education, and other human capital factors are controlled for. Findings highlight the need to examine other possible causes of the gender pay gap. Potential strategies for reducing the pay gap on online labor markets are also discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-2020) ◽  
pp. 107-123
Author(s):  
Lisanne Heilmann ◽  
Iddo Gal ◽  
Anke Grotlüschen

This paper looks at men’s and women’s positions in the labour market and relates them to their basic skills. In a meritocratic society higher skills are supposed to relate to higher outcomes. We question whether this relation is equally true for men and women. Using data for 13 countries from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), an international large-scale assessment, this paper examines monthly wages and a person’s probability to be in a managerial position. Our analyses show that, on average, men with higher skills get higher wages and have a higher probability to be in a managerial position than women with equally high skills. We show that the relation between skills and outcomes is more proportional for men than for women and that the gender pay gap does apply to women and men with similar skills. In addition, the results highlight a gap in managerial positions between men and women with the same basic skills.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Wieczorek-Szymańska

Diversity is one of the main characteristics of social groups, including work-teams. At the same time, gender is an important aspect of diversity in organizations, and gender diversity deals with the equal representation of men and women in the workplace. This article aims to analyze the issue of gender diversity in the academic sector and to evaluate the organizational maturity of particular universities in gender diversity management. To do so, the method of comparative case studies is used—Polish and Spanish higher education institutions are compared. First of all, the author describes the status of men and women in Poland and in Spain, in general (considering different socio-economic factors). In the next part of the article, the gender structure of employment in both the Polish and the Spanish academic sector is presented. Finally, the analysis of gender diversity in two universities is conducted. Additionally, the author introduces the model of organizational maturity in gender diversity management (OMDM), to evaluate organizational attitudes toward gender diversity and the type of gender diversity policy in universities. The findings reveal that, in both Polish and Spanish societies and economies, there still are barriers that cause inequalities between men and women in the labor market. Considering the situation in the academic sector, it can be said that the gender structure of employment is more balanced in Poland than in Spain. At the same time, the highest positions of full professors are mainly occupied by men both in Poland and in Spain. When analyzing the situation in the organizations, employment is more diverse in the Polish university, but both universities face the same problem—too little representation of women in top job positions. Consequently, both institutions are classified as those which are in the preliminary stage in the model of gender diversity management. This study contributes to a better understanding of the issue of gender diversity by comparing the status of men and women in the academic sector in two countries and in two universities. Additionally, the model of OMDM presented in this article can be a useful tool to assess the policy of gender diversity in different organizations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
James Christensen ◽  
Tom Parr ◽  
David V. Axelsen

Abstract In recent years, much public attention has been devoted to the existence of pay discrepancies between men and women at the upper end of the income scale. For example, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Hollywood gender pay gap’. We can refer to such discrepancies as cases of millionaire inequality. These cases generate conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the unequal remuneration involved looks like a troubling case of gender injustice. On the other, it’s natural to feel uneasy when confronted with the suggestion that multi-millionaires are somehow being paid inadequately. In this paper, we consider two arguments for rectifying millionaire inequality, clarifying their appeal but also identifying the obstacles that each will have to surmount in order to succeed.


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