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EARLY IN DECEMBER, we asked if you had any nagging questions remaining from 2016, about claims or facts or statistics you heard again and again over the course of the past 12 months.
We were inundated with excellent suggestions from readers, and picked out the very best ones. For the second installment, we’re looking at the gender pay gap.
Neil Mac Dhonnagáin had seen a lot of coverage and claims about this issue over the past year, and got in touch with us on Twitter to ask us to clear things up.
The “gender pay gap” is the difference between what women and men earn, on average, per hour, before tax.
The most recent commonly cited official figure is 14.41%, taken from 2014 data from Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistics agency.
This means that on average, women earn 14.41% less than men, per hour.
One of the most common claims around the gender pay gap is that this unequal pay is “for the same work“, with the strong implication being that women are paid less on the specific basis of their gender.
But this is not the case, generally speaking. Of course, there may be instances where women are paid less for doing the same work and the same hours as a male counterpart.
But such behaviour is gender-based discrimination, and is illegal under the Employment Equality Act.
The gender pay gap is a reality, but it’s not what it’s often portrayed as. So let’s take a deeper look at the data, to see what’s at play here.
“Gender overall earnings gap”
This is the difference between what men and women make in a month, on average, before tax. Believe it or not, the meaning of “on average” here is important.
The best source of figures on this is Eurostat’s “Structure of Earnings Survey”, which takes place every four years, the most recent one being in 2014.
It offers the mean and median monthly earnings of male and female employees in a variety of types of position, in part-time or full-time roles, and in various age brackets.
The mean is simply the total paid out divided by the number of workers, whereas the median is the monthly pay that half of workers earn above, and half earn below.
It is often regarded as a more reliable reflection of the average than the mean, because it’s not skewed by extremely high or low numbers, so we’ll be looking primarily at that, but you can check out the mean as well in a spreadsheet you can download below.
First, here are the figures for total monthly wages:
So women, on average, earn 22.8% less than men each month. But here’s something important that you should know – women, on average, work fewer hours each month than men – 129 as opposed to 149.
So when we adjust for that difference, and calculate hourly pay, let’s see what happens:
The gender gap shrinks, from 22.8% for monthly pay to 10.9% for hourly pay, when you take into account the fact that women, on average, work fewer hours than men.
Incidentally, the mean hourly wage gap (not median) is 14.4%, which is where the commonly-cited figure of 14% comes from.
So let’s look at various different categories, comparing the monthly gap to the hourly gap.
Full-time vs part-time
So while male full-time workers earn 10.6% more, on average, than their female counterparts, that gap rises to 14% when it comes to part-time work.
When you take the mean figures, the gap is 15.9% for full-time workers, and 10.8% for part-time workers.
And when hours worked are taken into account, the gap for full-time workers shrinks from 10.6% to 6%, but stays at 14% when it comes to part-time workers, because men and women in these roles both work an average of 87 hours a month.
Type of position
As you can see, the monthly wage gap is significant in every category, ranging from 8.6% for “plant and machine operators“, to 38.7% for “elementary occupations“, which include lower-paid jobs like domestic cleaners, street vendors, agricultural labourers and freight handlers.
(You can find a description of each of the types of position mentioned, here).
When we account for hours worked, the gender pay gap shrinks significantly in almost every category, but remains 9.2% at its very lowest and 23.6% at its highest, for clerical support workers.
Interestingly, female plant and machine operators actually work more hours per month, on average, than their male counterparts (161 as opposed to 160), so when that’s taken into account the gender gap actually grows, from 8.6% for monthly wages to 9.2% for hourly wages.
Age
What’s most striking about this is the way monthly wages grow for men over the years, and sustain that growth, as opposed to women.
While the gender gap in monthly wages is only 12% and 12.6% for workers aged up to 39, it explodes to 27.9% in the 40s, and reaches 41.4% for those aged over 60.
And while monthly wages reach a peak of €3,754 for men in their 50s, women will, on average, never earn as much as they do in their 30s (€2,682 per month).
Similarly, while a man in his 60s earns significantly more than a man aged under 30 (€3,034 vs €2,166), a woman in her 60s earns less than a woman aged under 30 (€1,777 vs €1,907).
As you might have expected, the number of hours worked has an impact here, again, with men consistently working more hours per month than women, causing the gender gap to shrink across all age groups, when compared to monthly wages.
What stands out from these figures is that women aged under 40 earn almost as much as their male counterparts, with the hourly wage gap standing at just 2.6% for those under 30, and 1.4% for those in their 30s.
However, when we take the mean figures (rather than the median), the gap is 1.1% for men and women under 30, and 6.2% for men and women aged 30-39.
So while there may or may not be an expansion of the gap in the 30s, depending on your method of calculation, we know that the discrepancy in pay between men and women is very significantly lower for workers under 40, than it is for all other age groups.
A “motherhood gap”?
One theory that could partly explain this phenomenon is the “motherhood gap” or “motherhood penalty”, which appears to show that a woman’s career progress is interrupted by having children.
Maternity leave can create gaps in employment, disrupt what may have been a path toward promotions and pay raises, and women returning from maternity leave might take up the same role they had previously, or return on a part-time basis, all factors contributing to lower pay than male counterparts.
Furthermore, by choice or otherwise, women also often seek or require greater flexibility in working hours than their male counterparts, for reasons of family and in particular, child care.
With men comparatively free to dedicate a greater number of hours – and in particular, anti-social hours, including travel for work – they often progress more quickly along the path towards promotion.
The “motherhood gap” is often understood to kick in during a woman’s 30s, which is roughly the average age at which a woman has her first child (in Ireland, the median was 30.1 years in 2014, according to our analysis of CSO data.
However, this theory would appear to be confounded by the data showing that the hourly gender gap actually shrinks, rather than grows, from 2.6% for those under 30 to 1.4% for those in their 30s (when the median hourly wage is used).
But this further complicated by the fact that the gap does expand (from 1.1% to 6.2%) when the mean hourly wage is used.
This is a complex issue, which will require further research and more detailed data, in the coming years.
But we can dispell a couple of myths, at this stage.
Firstly, the gender pay gap isn’t really about discrimination. In the relatively rare cases where it is, an employer is breaking the law.
Women don’t earn less than men simply by virtue of being women. The causes are complex, and often strongly related to a woman’s gender, but gender is not in itself the cause, generally speaking.
Equally though, the gender pay gap is a real phenomenon, contrary to the commonly-expressed view that it is a “myth” (this is, itself, a kind of myth).
Even when you account for the greater number of hours that men work, on average the hourly wages of women are less than those of men – across various types of job, whether part-time or full-time, and across all age groups.
It is real, and pervasive. But it’s not uniformly pervasive. As this article has shown, age in particular matters a great deal, with younger women earning almost as much as younger men, while the gender gap stretches to between 20% and 30% for women in their 50s and 60s.
For certain occupations (particularly the very low-paid types of jobs included in “elementary occupations” in the Eurostat data), the gap is desperately wide, with women earning almost one quarter less than their men.
On the other hand, women who work full time earn, by comparison, only 6% less than men who work full time.
To download a spreadsheet containing all the relevant data, click here.
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Fair play for at least making an effort to explore this based on facts and arguments from both sides. No clear ideological bias from you, which fairly rare in the media. Keep them coming
Why don’t greyhound employ equal numbers of women as refuse collectors. There seems to be a disgraceful lack of female refuse collectors
@Patrick Gough:
One can only hire who applies Padawan.
Once that is truly revealed. The real crux of the discussion reveals itself.
Charlie
Gov could pass laws requiring a quote to be filled….,..but that’s only for higher up jobs for women.
The same reason there are very few male beauty therapists
So, the gender pay gap is a myth.
Thanks for putting that to bed.
@Alex Falcone: ‘Equally though, the gender pay gap is a real phenomenon, contrary to the commonly-expressed view that it is a “myth”’
Well, it *is* a Journal article.
But based on what’s written here (and elsewhere) the difference in men and women’s pay is more properly described as an “earnings gap”.
Men are getting more money because of what they do, not because of what they are.
Thanks again for the info, dan – keep up the good work!
Thanks for mansplaining that, Dan. If I have incorrectly assumed your gender I apologise.
You never know these days.
A whole lot of palaver to basically say that there is no actual wage gap. Next in the news Apples are not the same as Oranges.
Figures dont match up with a uk study which stated women in their 20s earned more than men
I’m not sure what study you’re referencing but Deloitte put the gender gap, with all other factors taken in to account, at 9%.
@Mursh: ‘Equally though, the gender pay gap is a real phenomenon, contrary to the commonly-expressed view that it is a “myth”’
There is a pay gap. You can’t have your own truth, check the stats.
It would be interesting to see a control for length of employment too and to think about the over 40 problem as an indicator that the problem is going away for workers entering the labour market in the past decade or two.
It would also be interesting to do the study in the civil service where we know there isn’t a pay scale gap and therefore any difference is accounted for by things like maternity leave and other ‘lifestyle’ features related to gender either by tradition or biology.
The Irish Examiner covered this last year with using stats from the Office of National Statistics, comparing the earnings of men and women between 2006 and 2013.
This backs up what Shawn said.
Other things to consider. Woman on average work fewer hours. This doesn’t just affect pay, as the author accounted for, but these hours reflect job experience. The more hours you put in, the better you become and the more likely you are to get a promotion.
And while the job categories are grouped somewhat they don’t really reflect the different roles men and women may have. Men will tend to do the more labour intensive and dangerous work and are rightly compensated more for this work.
Younger women are actually going onto third level education at a greater rate than men so younger women are more likely to be paid more. This might help to account for greater parity in pay of younger people.
When people say the gender pay gap is a myth what they really mean is the narrative that there’s a conspiracy to pay women less merely because they’re women is a myth.
Is there a stat which represents the percentage gap between each sexes pay, adjusted to compare only those who have the same number of work hours, same job title, same company, same company branch, same age, same years working, same years working in that company, same commission earning, etc., etc?
I’ve been eager to see someone do this and present it to the public articulately. This article doesn’t do that sadly. And I’m too dumb/lazy to do it myself.
The elephant in the room is that some women, maybe even many, WANT less hours and less responsibility. There is very little evidence that for the SAME work, women are paid less. Women and men go for different jobs and have different priorities. This is is neither good nor bad by itself, it just is. Many women want part-time hours or to work at home.
No problem with that, in fact I wish men had more opportunities to do exactly that!
It’s not a ‘penalty’ to earn less because you rake time out of work, it’s just realistic. If a man took X years out of work, he’d probably lose some earning potential also. It’s not unfair.
Think about this: if women really earned 27% less, as was claimed a lot recently, then companies would hire LOADS of them as they could get cheap labour! Obviously they don;t, so that simply can’t be true.
Yawn
We all don’t need to be equal
Very balanced article. Validates what “misogynists” have been saying all along. Perhaps they should be listened to more? At the same time, does state that there is still an issue which needs to be addressed but with more accurate scope for solutions than the broad brush approach that is being applied to the overall gap which isn’t adjusted for hours worked. Following that approach would just mean men end up working more hours than women just to earn the same.
Any chance you could post a one paragraph summary of the result at the start of these?
If anyone cares to argue how you got there then they can ready on. But I trust you.
Excellent work Dan. True unbiased journalism. The ‘motherhood’ and ‘childcare’ gaps are a real phenomenon that might explain away some of the statistical anomalies we see. Actual gender discrimination IS illegal. When I hear this topic discussed in the media, I never hear solutions proposed that will solve the supposed problem. It would be true discrimination to pay individuals the same regardless of other factors (experience, education, unbroken service, commitment etc.), be they male or female. As a society, we should be happier to proclaim that we give mothers and fathers the choices and opportunities to do what is right for them with regard to work-life balance.
All these almost, only and just make it all unfair. There shouldn’t be any almosts, onlys and justs. The pay should be equal. It is even a bit strange that you still need to prove and spread this idea.
The Clinton Foundation has a giant pay gap…
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