Gender Pay Gap | In Conversation with Public Policy India
In this edition, read on about gender pay gap across the world, and some intriguing discussions on steps that can be taken to bridge what is, today, an unavoidable feature of the modern workforce.
According to UN Women, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. As a result, there's a lifetime of gendered income inequality, with more women retiring into poverty. This gap has been consistent across most countries and sectors. It further worsens for female immigrants and women of color, and is also strongly evident across the caste system in South Asia.
In our previous edition, we shed light on how traditional gender roles lead to women taking up a majority of the responsibility of domestic care work and paying a heavy opportunity cost in their careers. In this edition, we pick up from there to understand how the gender pay gap contributes to a lifetime of setbacks for women.
We look at the gender pay gap across countries, races, caste, and the mechanisms that currently are in place to work on improving current conditions.
As always, the newsletter contains job postings shared on our WhatsApp groups.
Happy Reading!
Best,
The Newsletter Team
Before we dive into the newsletter, earlier this month Women in Econ/Policy founders and directors - Ria, Prerna, and Anahita had the opportunity to chat with Public Policy India, about the challenges women face while building a career in the policy space and their initiatives to build an accessible platform for mentorship and networking for women all over the world.
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Gender Pay Gap Across The World
This article by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser presents data and research on economic inequalities between men and women. Whenever the data allows it, it also discusses how these inequalities have been changing over time.
This OECD Database is one of the most useful databases with statistics from the OECD Employment Outlook Report (2021) and other related publications on the Gender Wage Gap across countries.
The Women in Work Index 2022 gives us an opportunity to reflect on the very real impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s lives, jobs, economic prosperity, and broader wellbeing.
Gender Pay Gap in Male-Dominated Sectors
This article by The Catalyst gives a brief summary of pay gaps existing in historically male-dominated sectors, and the challenges faced by women in breaking these barriers.
In the report, ‘Women’s work and the gender pay gap’, Jessica Schieder and Elise Gould talk about how even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.
This paper by Julie Prescott and Jan Bogg gives us an interesting insider view into the computer games industry, with a focus on occupational segregation in terms of gender role identity and differences in career barriers, progression, and promotion.
“Overall, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women” - this New York Times article gives an insight into various studies addressing the gender pay gap problem in male-dominated industries.
Gender Pay Gap Across Minorities
‘Within India, a seeming paradox is that gender differentials in agricultural wages are the largest in southern regions of India that are otherwise favorable to women.’ Find out how and why in this paper by Kanika Mahajan and Bharat Ramaswami.
This thought-provoking article by Ankita Kundu discusses unpaid care work and labor through the lens of traditional male superiority and association of feminity with ‘loving and nurturing’ as a barrier to women’s economic progress.
Using a field experiment in India where patients are randomly assigned to rank among a set of physicians of the same gender but with different castes and years of experience, this paper explores the differences in patients’ physician choices that are consistent with gender-based statistical discrimination. Further, it finds that gender discrimination is greater for lower caste doctors, who typically suffer from caste discrimination.
‘The history of the gender and racial wage gaps is inextricably linked to the history of labor in America. From depriving Black women of wages while they toiled under the system of slavery and its aftermath, to creating lasting disparities in health, education, safety, and opportunity for Native women’ - this report deep dives into the historical nature and severity of the racial gender wage gap.
Roe v/s Wade & Women in the Workforce
In our last edition, we discussed the impact of choosing between career and family on women’s professional lives. In this edition, we look at the key problem that addresses gender equality, the gender pay gap. While we do that, it is hard to overlook recent events that will have a potential impact on women’s autonomy all over the world.
In a significant curtailment of women’s rights, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a 1973 landmark decision that gave women in America the right to have an abortion before the fetus was viable outside the womb — before the 24-28 week mark.
Here are some readings to understand how this landmark decision would affect women’s work lives in the future :
Vox talks about the 5 ways in which the criminalisation of abortion can affect women at work.
Some economists — including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — argue that access to abortion opened up opportunities for many of the most financially vulnerable women to enter the labor force and earn higher wages. They fear that new limits on the practice will not only hurt those people but the overall economy as well at a time when inflation is raging and low workforce participation looms as an obstacle to recovery. Read more here.
This article explores the inequities that are expected to widen following the overturning of Roe V. Wade in the United States.
Many factors drove women into the workforce in greater numbers in the 1970s. Scholars argue that abortion access was an important one. Read more here.
Job and Internship Openings
Note: These are jobs shared by members over WhatsApp over the last 2 weeks. Please check if positions are still open before applying. If you are thinking about applying to one of these, you can also drop a message on the WhatsApp group or on the google group to connect with members currently working in these organizations.
Applications for the Duke University Graduate Mentorship Program for prospective Ph.D. students have now opened. More details and timelines can be found here.
EPIC India is hiring Research Interns as well as Research Associates for various projects across India. Details for the same can be found here.
Swaniti Initiative is hiring Urban Development/Planning and Livelihood Specialists for Associate/Sr. Associate positions in Chhattisgarh. For more information, you can get in touch with amruuta.p@swaniti.in.
The Quantum Hub is hiring for multiple positions in India. For more details on the Manager/Associate roles, check this link.
Soundarya Iyer is hiring a Research Associate who can assist in qualitative analysis on a project titled ‘Understanding the Sociology of Declining Rural Female Labour Force Participation Rate'. More details can be found here.
This newsletter was put together by Amruuta and Ridhima.
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