Women Earn Less Money than Men the More the Sexes share
the Same Occupations
New Research says “Women Earn More If They Work in
Different Occupations Than Men, Large International Study Finds”
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.
The research, published Dec. 18 in the journal Sociology,
compared the degree to which men and women are working in different professions
with the gap between their pay.
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.
The researchers, Professor Robert Blackburn and Dr Girts
Racko, of Cambridge, and Dr Jennifer Jarman, of Lakehead, used statistics for
each country on the proportion of women and men in each occupation, and the
overall average gap in pay. They correlated these to show the relationships
between workplace segregation of the sexes and the gap in their pay.
"Higher overall segregation tends to reduce male
advantage and improve the position of women," the researchers say in their
paper.
"The greater the degree of overall segregation, the
less the possibility exists for discrimination against women and so there is
more scope for women to develop progressive careers.
"For instance, within nursing men disproportionately
fill the senior positions...but the fewer the number of male nurses, the more
the senior positions must be filled by women.
"Perhaps our most important finding is that, at
least for these industrially developed countries, overall segregation and the
vertical [pay gap] dimension are inversely related. The higher the overall
segregation, the lower the advantage to men. This is directly contrary to
popular assumptions."
Sociology is published by the British Sociological
Association and SAGE.
Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1305802
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