The salary inequality between men and women is well known in the corporate world today. And there has been a lot of effort to reduce that gap, but it hasn’t really come down. Now, one research suggests that only when women work in sectors different from men, they are able to earn equally or even more than men in that sector. So, majority and specialization counts.
Women earn less money than men the more the sexes share the same occupations, a large-scale survey of 20 industrialised countries has found. Researchers from the universities of Cambridge, UK, and Lakehead, Canada, found that the more women and men keep to different trades and professions, the more equal is the overall pay average for the two sexes in a country.
The researchers attribute the surprising results to the fact that when there are few men in an occupation, women have more chance to get to the top and earn more. But where there are more equal numbers of men and women working in an occupation the men dominate the high-paying jobs.
Pay was most equal in Slovenia, where women on average earn slightly more than men, and in Mexico, Brazil, Sweden and Hungary, where women earn almost as much as men on average. In these countries men and women work in different occupations to a greater extent than in many of the other countries the researchers looked at.
In other countries such as Japan, the Czech Republic, Austria and Netherlands, women are more likely to work in the same occupations as men, and the gap between their pay and men’s is higher than average. The UK was higher than average among the 20 countries for inequality in pay.