Gender Pay Gap
And why men still get paid more
With the push for equality and social progress becoming ever stronger over the past few years, the gender pay gap remains an unfortunate reality. Let’s explore which professions are affected the most, and compare pay gaps across different countries over time.
Jobs with the largest pay gaps in the UK
Despite years of progress, the gender pay gap is unfortunately still a very real thing. In terms of industry, typically male-dominated fields like engineering or technology tend to have more men in higher-paying positions. Given this, you would think that women-dominated fields such as healthcare would have more women in high-paying positions right?
Wrong. According to CareerSmart, male midwives (midhusbands?) earned an average of £44,321 in 2020, while female midwives earned an average of £40,150. Education, which is another primarily women-dominated field, also has men earning more - £43,279 for male primary teachers vs £40,150 for females.
Surprisingly, two professions had women earning more - environment professionals (£41,193 for women vs £40,671 for men) and medical radiographers (£44,843 for women vs £43,279 for men). However, the pay gaps in these fields are nowhere near the top - male legal professionals earn almost 43% more than female, while male chief executives earn up to 23% more than their female counterparts.
Get smarter in 5 minutes with Morning Brew (it's free)
There's a reason over 4 million people start their day with Morning Brew - the daily email that delivers the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Business news doesn't have to be boring...make your mornings more enjoyable, for free.
*This is sponsored advertising content.
Progress over time
In the past couple of decades, extensive progress has been made in reducing the gender pay gap. The UK had a gap of 47% in 1970, brought down to 17% by 2016.
Japan’s progress is an interesting one. The pay gap actually increased between 1976 and 1982 and is still the second-largest out of all OECD countries today behind South Korea. A significant cause for this is the lack of female managers. Between two typical career tracks, most Japanese men tend to go for the managerial track (sogo shoku) while women tend to go for a more closed-end clerical track (ippan shoku). In fact, only 14.7% of manager-level employees are women, while around 42% of UK managers are women.
See you on Wednesday for charts on Congressional insider trading!
Want to advertise your brand in our newsletter? Click below and we’ll get back to you ASAP!
Men used to work more hours, more difficult jobs, be more competitive, have a lower level of agreeableness useful in enterprise and highly stressful environments of companies. That's way the gender pay, it has nothing to do with the genders themselves, but with the behaviors that each gender generally exhibits.
I saw an interesting take on this with alot of the Scandinavian countries who have lower gender pay gaps based off more generous but also forced equal parental leave provisions. Which lead one to believe there is a correlation between gender pay and parenthood.