Gender Wage Gap In Spain And Europe: Trends, Policies, And Implications

Critique

Discuss about the Learning Strategies for Policies and Outcomes.

The article aims to document recent trends in gender gaps in wages and employment in Spain. The paper is the updated version of a report that was a background paper for the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development by the World Bank. As per the article, despite that impressive decline in the gender gap in employment, the chances are that women work less in comparison to males. The gender gap in wages is still high. The most notifying aspect is that gender gap is wages is driven primarily by differences in returns to individual characteristics. Female employment has the prime focus on lower paid jobs like sales, service and clerical support as the responsibilities of such jobs are less. In spite of the fact that women have more qualification than men, they earn less as per the labour market features. The existing literature indicates that reaction of households to incentives put forward by different policies and reforms are responsible to some extent for the female labour market features. The paper suggests that there are glass-ceiling and sticky-floor effects on female wages. A huge influx of immigrants allows educated women to enter the labour market. However, there is a need for changes to be made in policies to shorten the gap existing in gender wage gap.

Critique: The article throws light on the fact that though the Spanish labour market has witnessed a significant transformation in the recent few decades, the gender gap in employment and wages is still prevalent. Statistical analysis of the data gives a clear picture of the reasons why gender wage gap is still there in Spain. The results are indicative that there is a strong self-selection into the labour market. There is a negative correlation between the gender employment gap and gender wage gap across countries. The strength of the article is that it uses descriptive statistics for drawing the results. The statistical measures used are the Machado-Mata decomposition methods, the Oaxaca decomposition method, quantile regressions. These statistical analysis methods are noteworthy methods of data analysis as they help in discovering predictable relationships between the variables. The findings of the study are not generalisable as the study is restricted to data from only one country that is Spain. The literature used in this article is relevant and have the important relation to this article. The article is successful in supporting arguments put up by literature used in the article regarding the confounding relationship between gender employment gap and gender pay gap.

Implications for an essay

Implications for an essay: The article adds to the understanding of the topic as it highlights the fundamental reasons why gender pay gap is into existence and how this issue can be resolved. The social implications of the gender pay gap are the main highlight of the article, strengthening the argument that a number of reasons coming up from the society are responsible for gender pay gap.

The article studied the slow convergence in the gender gap in wages for addressing the gap existing in literature that has given attention to the indicators for women wage inequality. The study paid attention to the most considerable factor that affects trends in gender gap wages, that is changes taking place in the social organisation of work front. The authors carry out a suitable assessment of the existing relationship between drifts in overwork and drifts in the pattern of gender wage gap. The assessment was carried out by using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1979 to 2009, and it was supplemented by the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data. The analysis features the graphical description of formal wage trends. The study concluded that though there have been remarkable changes in the education of women and their entry into the labour forces, convergence in the gender gap in wages has not shown much progress. As men have more chances of engaging in overwork, wages on men are more in comparison to women, exacerbating the gender wage gap. Long work hours are more considered by men than women, and situation of men commonly following the custom of overwork is always implanted in occupational cultures and organisational practices.

Critique: The authors argue that the relative prevalence of overwork in managerial and professional occupations can help in understanding the invariable gender gap in wages in such occupations. The article put up a sturdy experimental association between gender pay gaps and developments in overwork as a part of organisation culture. It puts forward the point that as we gradually shift towards valuing long work hours, we pave the path for wage inequality. The MORG analytic sample of the study has a limitation of including civilian workers whose age is between 18 and 64 years. Self-employed workers were excluded from the study, also adding to the limitation. It is very important to have suitable inclusion and exclusion criteria in any research. The article has clear graphical representations of data, adding to the suitability. The findings are generalisable as data has been gathered from a large and varied section of the populations. The article is successful in presenting other research. The literature used is aligned with the overall argument of the research. The literature review section has encompassed innumerable literary sources, making it a rich review altogether.

Study on the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages in Europe

Implications for the essay: The study has achieved new heights in illustrating how novice methods of organising work load can disseminate previous forms of gender equality. It strengthens the argument that gender wage gap can be diminished if changes are brought in the differences in the amount of time given by men and women to their organisations.

The article is significant for the present discussion as it threw light on gender wage gaps, glass ceilings and sticky floors as prevalent in Europe. The authors attempted to gain insight into the gender wage gap that is prevalent in 26 countries of Europe. They considered data to be collected from a varied range of sources to make it a credible research paper. Data was collected from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. The range of gender wage gap has variation across countries, and this aspect is significant in the process of understanding its intensity on a worldwide basis. Quantile regressions were undertaken in the research. It indicated that the trend in a number of countries is that the wage gap is more at the top and / or at the bottom of the distribution of wages.  Cross-country variation in wage gaps was used for a large sample for exploring the impact of policies reconciling family life and work and wage-setting institutions. It was found that institutions and policies have a major relation with the gender wage gap in quantitatively significant approach.

Critique: The main argument of the article is that the gap being wider at the top of the distribution is referred to as ‘glass ceilings’ whereas the gap being more at the bottom of the distribution is referred to as ‘sticky floors’. The results suggested that larger median/mode gender gap is common. Moreover, glass ceilings are more common for employees who work full-time. This means that females are suffer disadvantage in jobs that are better. These attributes are related to policies of different countries that vary from each other. Evaluation cannot be done individually for each country at one single go. The strength of the study is that it strives to compare data from different countries, making it a valuable study on the research topic of gender wage gap. The limitation of the study is that it is written in a critical manner and a more simple use of terms and flow of writing would have been beneficial. The findings of the study are generalisable as data had been collected from 26 different countries of Europe. The article is supported by a number of literature that helps in establishing the main inferences from the study. It is in alignment with other literature on this area of research.

Critique

Implications for the essay: The article helps in understanding whether there is any relation between gender pay gap and patterns of policies and institutions in every country. It supports the idea that future work is needed for considering changes in policies and institutions that have the potential to bring changes in gender gaps with the passage of time.

The article provided an overview of the primary factors that contribute to gender pay in Australia, Europe and UK. The rationale for the study was that even after four years of implementing the first equal pay legislation, there is still the issue of gender wage gap in the society as women face such discrimination in the labour market. Moreover, in some countries, the issue is becoming more widespread with each passing year. There is no resistance to stop the growing consequences of gender wage gap in many countries. The research was conducted by reviewing papers addressing the research topic of international perspectives on gender pay gap. The article identified four main themes: legal developments and the impact of such developments, conceptual and theoretical debates, employer demands and wage setting demands and emerging inequalities regarding pay within ethnic and educational groups. The four themes were used for underlining how the trends capture gender wage gap dynamism. The main dimensions emerging from the paper were link between bargaining and litigation strategies, interaction between new practices in organisation and institutions that set wages, and lastly, the spectrum of diversity strands that have competition among themselves for getting equal treatment.

Critique: The article argues that diversity management together with HR management have made some contribution to notable improvements in closing gender pay gap. The demands for equality in the pay of men and women need to have a proper context. The article also point out that gender pay gaps have a distinctive variation between advanced countries. It further argues that though in some countries the trend has seen a downfall, in other countries the achievement is reversed. The article has the strength of reviewing papers that are recent in publication. A systematic search for the papers had been conducted, making all the included articles to be relevant for the study. The findings are generalisable as papers from all over the world had been included for the review. The research had been undertaken after a thorough literature search. The overall arguments and counter-arguments presented are noteworthy and appreciable.

Implications for the essay

Implications for an essay: The article supports the idea that progress in closing the generated gender wage gap in the coming years would be difficult. It helps in getting a clear picture of what is required for making a collective effort to close the gap and how success can be achieved. It, however, warns that accomplishing victory not be a quick process and more research would be needed in this direction.

The four research articles highlight the main reasons why gender pay gap is still found in many countries across the globe. While gender pay gap is traditionally low in some countries, it is significantly high in some countries. The widening of the gender pay gap is thought to be a result of expansion if the employment of women in sectors where wages are low (Ludsteck 2014). The articles address this concern to a considerable extent. They bring out the social reasons why such gap exists, implying that changes brought about in these sectors who diminish the rate of the pay gap between the two genders. As opined by Sauré and Zoabi (2014) the universal factor accounting for the gap is a lack of impactful reforms and policies and absence of strong institutions. The articles have this fact as the underlying principle in the researches undertaken. All the four articles have succeeded in outlining the need of future research and the domains that need urgent attention if the world is to be made free of gender wage gap. The four articles have provided the required information on the research topic and enlightened the readers.

References

Cha, Y. and Weeden, K.A., 2014. Overwork and the slow convergence in the gender gap in wages. American Sociological Review, 79(3), pp.457-484

Christofides, L.N., Polycarpou, A. and Vrachimis, K., 2013. Gender wage gaps,‘sticky floors’ and ‘glass ceilings’ in Europe. Labour Economics, 21, pp.86-102.

Guner, N., Kaya, E. and Sánchez-Marcos, V., 2014. Gender gaps in Spain: policies and outcomes over the last three decades. SERIEs, 5(1), pp.61-103.

Ludsteck, J., 2014. The impact of segregation and sorting on the gender wage gap: Evidence from German linked longitudinal employer-employee data. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 67(2), pp.362-394.

O’Reilly, J., Smith, M., Deakin, S. and Burchell, B., 2015. Equal Pay as a Moving Target: International perspectives on forty-years of addressing the gender pay gap. Cambridge Journal of Economics. 39 (2) pp. 299-317.

Sauré, P. and Zoabi, H., 2014. International trade, the gender wage gap and female labor force participation. Journal of Development Economics, 111, pp.17-33.