That women earn less than men in rich countries is so well-known it is often met with a shrug. The gender wage gap is one of ten indicators in our annual “glass-ceiling index”, ranking how women fare in the workplace. On most measures, including representation on boards and in parliaments, countries improve each year. But across the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries, the median gap is stuck at 11.4%, up from a low of 11.1% in 2020 (see chart) despite policies designed to narrow it.
Anti-discrimination and equal-pay laws have been on most countries’ books for decades. In 2017 Britain started forcing big companies to publish wage-gap data; the eu and Japan have followed. Ten American states have laws requiring employers to disclose pay in job advertisements. Yet the gap remains, and in some countries, such as Australia and Japan, is growing.
One reason is that the pandemic disproportionately affected women, who were likelier to be laid off or to quit to look after their children. This tallies with the still sizeable “motherhood penalty” hurting the careers of women who start families. It is particularly true in countries with costly childcare such as Britain and America. Other research looks at the gender differences in careers, children or not.
A recent book argues that women continue to be muscled out of the highest-paid sectors such as banking and tech. In “Fair Shake”, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone and Nancy Levit, three American law professors, say that a “winner takes all” model of competition and excessive working hours discourages women from entering certain fields and holds down those who do. At many firms, a “tournament-like” culture where workers battle for bonuses favours men, who tend to form alliances and may behave badly to get ahead.
In a striking example, the proportion of women with computer-science degrees peaked in 1986; women are now twice as likely to leave the tech industry as men. The maleness of Silicon Valley was by no means inevitable. Studies have also found that even when women enter male-dominated fields, wages tend to fall, suggesting that their labour is systematically undervalued. Sexual harassment is also still rife in these fields, with women who report it likelier to switch to lower-paying jobs.
Care work, norms and work culture help to explain why corporate career pipelines seem so selectively leaky. Women hold 43% of managerial jobs at big American companies, but their share of chief executives’ suites has only just passed 10%. That’s hard to shrug off.■
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