Average 여성알바 구인구직 part-time workers wages in Japan, per hour, as of June 2021, by age group (in Japanese yen) [Graph]. The following analysis is focused on gender gaps in self-reported hourly gross wages for workers aged 25-54 years old at their main working age, captured in the Labor Force Survey (LFS).
The most important factors associated with the gender pay gap are full-time/part-time employment, education, size of the business a person is employed with, and occupational segregation (women are underrepresented in management occupations and higher-paying professional occupations). Womens higher share of part-time jobs, with lower median wages compared with full-time jobs, also contributed significantly to the gender wage gap in 2021. In addition to explicit discrimination, several studies have explained the gender pay gap by womens higher share of part-time work and longer periods out of the labor force because of caring responsibilities, among other factors.
Although now relatively irrelevant to the overall picture, disruptions and shorter hours for female workers are still substantial in highly-skilled professions, perhaps because of compensatory differences. The allocation of men and women workers by sector plays a critical role in explaining this disparity, especially the large share of men employed in highly paid sectors, such as construction. The causes of the wage gap are multifaceted, but they can be attributed, in part, to occupational segregation, in which women are overrepresented in lower-paying jobs and underrepresented in higher-paying ones; to gender-based pay discrimination, which results in women being paid less for doing the same job as men; and disproportionate responsibility for caring. Recent studies using employer-employee matching data have shown that almost 80 percent of the gender pay gap, in a sample of 16 OECD countries, is attributed to inequal compensation across firms, (OECD, 2021 ).
At the European Commission level, the gender wage gap is defined as the relative difference between womens and mens median hourly gross earnings in the overall economy. The unadjusted gender pay gap, or pay inequality, is usually a mean difference in median or mean over the compensation for all employed men and women within a selected sample. The gender wage gap does not include earnings from part-time jobs, earnings from casual employment, and increases in the hourly rates of overtime. Hourly wages are used instead of weekly earnings or annual earnings in order to avoid comparisons between different amounts of work.
Information about indicator Descriptions or Definitions The compensation inequality measure is based on self-reported routine hourly earnings for employed workers aged 25-54 at their primary workplace. This table shows results for average usual hourly earnings for visible minority groups. Figure 1.4 includes data on the gender wage gaps in the highest and lowest deciles of the earnings distribution, and shows that gender wage gaps are generally largest in higher-earning individuals–reflecting womens difficulties advancing through the labor market. Average hourly wages can vary across groups for various reasons, including educational level, experience, sector of work, occupation, or proportion of employment in part-time jobs.
While some women may prefer part-time employment, including all workers in the calculation of wage gaps also helps capture the experiences of those women forced into part-time employment due to unpaid caregiving obligations, and of those who wish to work more hours, but who are denied full-time status and benefits by their employers. Recognizing this, various efforts are under way to incorporate all women and men workers–including those working part-time and year-round–into wage gap calculations, helping to capture the economic realities of all working women. The wage gap for full-time, full-year workers results in women making $10,435 less annually on average, and $13,551 less when accounting for all workers. Gender pay gaps Gender wage gaps in OECD countries The OECDs median gender pay gap is 12.8%–that is, the median full-time working woman earns, on average, 87 cents for every dollar or euro earned by the median-earning man who works full-time today (Figure 1.1). The gap is even larger when looking at average earnings for all workers, which women and men bring home at the end of the year, since women typically work fewer hours in paid employment than men.
Critics of the persisting gender wage gap say that this is the byproduct of choices women make: choices to work fewer hours, to accept low-paying jobs, or opt out of the labor force over longer periods of time than men. Ian Watson at Macquarie University examined the gender pay gap for full-time managers in Australia for 2001-2008, finding that 65-90% of that earnings difference cannot be explained by a wide range of demographic and labour market variables. We conclude that many traditional explanations still hold some merit.
Although the gender wage gap has decreased between 1998 and 2021 for Canadian employees, in 2021, hourly earnings of male employees continued to be higher than those of female employees.
In contrast, reporting gender wage gaps across subgroups such as occupation, skills, or experience would have been more effective at highlighting disparities between similar men and women.6 However, it has an increased administrative burden, may deter companies from adopting active equalizing policies when differences are minor, and even discourage firms from acting on parts of the gender wage gap that are accounted for by observable characteristics.