Gender Wage Gap

Blau, F.D., & Kahn, L.M. (2016). The gender wage gap: Extent, trends, and explanations.

Journal of Economic Literature, 1-5.

The paper seeks to find out the extent to which the wage gap could result from women’s workforce interruptions that lead to shorter working hours, especially in high skilled occupations. From the study, differences in gender roles and also the gender division of labour are important factors contributing to the pay gap.

Human capital aspects that include one’s schooling and work experience will feature prominently in the reason females have lower salaries compared to their male colleagues. Based on this study, other factors include the family division of labour, current compensating wage differentials, discrimination at the place of work, and challenges in females being selected into the labour force compared to men.

Goldin, C. (2014). A grand convergence: It’s last chapter. American Economic Review,

104(4), 1091-1119.

This paper analyses the possibility of the pay gap increasing when firms have incentives that disproportionately reward individuals who labour for long hours and those who are likely to work on particular hours. The findings point out that the wage one gets is a summary of statistics depicting individual’s education achievement, progressive training, prior labour force experience accumulated, and also the expected future participation in designated roles.

Here, the gender pay gap summarises gender differences at different working assignments, and it gives an analysis of the human capital differences between men and women and the differential treatment of each sex at the labour market.

Watson, I. (2010). Decomposing the gender pay gap in the Australian Managerial Labour

Market. Australian Journal of Labour Economics, 13(1), 49-79.

This is a study that examines the gender gap among large corporations’ full-time managers in the country from 2001 to 2008. The study uses decompositions to explore the role discrimination plays in the gender pay gap and it also factors in the roles one’s working experience and the impact of parenting on the pay gap.

The findings point out that the pay gap is enormous because the women managers are female. Also, the presence of dependent children worsens the gap as women concentrate on raising children. Additionally, women tend to settle for less challenging tasks and so their incomes diminish over the years as those of men stabilise.

Journalists Resource (2015). Equal pay, gender wage gaps and “constantly moving

goalposts”: Review of 40 years of research. Retrieved on March 30, 2017, from https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-society/equal-pay-gender-wage-gaps-moving-goalposts-research-review

This website is explaining the role of workplace competition and the resulting effect on female employment and also the impact of long days and overworks on the wage gaps.  The authors note that education differential contributes immensely to the wage gap and it favours men given that women focus more on domestic activities rather than their education and development.

The gap worsens when females take prolonged breaks from their working schedules especially when they raise children. Therefore, the wage gaps could be derived primarily from the behaviour of women and their preferences, and this is beside the potential institutional and discriminatory barriers in the labour force.

Zawadi, A.K. (2015). This poem slams Gender Inequality. Huffington Post, Retrieved on

March 30, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/annie-kashamura-zawadi/we-are-here-we-are-alive-and-still-standing_b_8712508.html

The author talks about females doing so much work but they receive low payment. The justification cited are un-deterrent laws and sentences that abet different parties turning a blind eye on women’s pleas.

The result is that the female gender is beaten and left powerless as the male gender has it all and has the women in check. In addition, most contributions done by women are ignored and so they receive less visibility compared to men and this contributes to their reduced experience and widening pay gaps. The result is an overworked female labour force, discriminatory employment practices and a considerably less pay compared to men.

Drawing the material together

It is evident that women participate more in domestic activities compared to their male counterparts. The residual gender pay gap has been reducing because women have improved their efforts in bargaining for better pay and working terms relative to men. However, there is still a large gap in the amount each sex is paid for a similar job done. Further studies are required to explain why the different summations of hours worked daily or weekly bring bounty a large effect on the labour force’s time adjusted earnings in some occupations and there is no effect on others.

Women should increase their productivity enhancing characteristics for them to squeeze out the human capital part of the wage difference. They need to choose careers that shall pay incremental wages as one’s working experience improves and they may consider limiting out of work breaks to the very essential ones only.

Most important resources

1. The assertion by Blau & Kahn (2016) that women make many sacrifices and they end up taking prolonged breaks from their work duties as they aim to bring up their families will help their partners to look for alternative ways of reducing the out of office breaks. Also, in some cases, they should support with domestic duties to allow women time to concentrate on building their careers.
2. The analysis pointed out by Goldin (2014) that incentives at the place of work contribute a great deal to the wage difference will incentivise women to see how they can enhance their performance to bridge the gap.