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Mandated gender wage gap disclosure laws are an increasingly popular but relatively untested solution to gender-based compensation inequalities. Scholars and policymakers alike have argued that disclosure will lead to greater social accountability—either reputational harm for firms revealing large disparities or benefit for more-egalitarian organizations. Yet little research has directly tested this central assumption. We advance understanding of this issue by examining reactions from a key constituency affected by pay gaps: employees. We analyze the existence, magnitude, and persistence of changes in employees' public affective evaluations of their employers on the review site Glassdoor in the wake of pay gap disclosures prompted by new regulations in the United Kingdom. We find a short-lived improvement in employees' evaluations of organizations reporting pay parity, consistent with a reputational boost. At the same time, we find little evidence of a negative post-disclosure reaction from employees of firms reporting sizable gender-based disparities. We take an abductive approach to investigate these surprising findings, probing key assumptions and the viability of different plausible explanations for the results. We consider how our empirical findings can inform the development of novel theory in the areas of gender wage inequality, reputation, and transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender wage gap and the gender work gap are sizable, persistent and well documented for many countries. The result of the gender wage and gender work gap combined is an income gap between men and women. A small literature has begun to examine how the tax-benefit system contributes to closing gender income gaps by redistributing between men and women. In this paper, we study the effect of tax-benefit policy on gender differences in income in the EU27 countries and the UK. We use microsimulation models linked to survey data to estimate gender gaps in market income (before taxes and transfers) and disposable income (after taxes and transfers) for each country. We then decompose the difference between the gender gap in market income and the gender gap in disposable income into the relative contribution of taxes and benefits in each country. We also isolate the relative contributions of the gender wage gap and the gender work gap to the overall gap in income between men and women in two of these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of a pay transparency intervention in reducing the gender pay gap in the UK university sector. Introduced in 2007, the initiative enabled public access to average annual earnings disaggregated by gender in UK universities. We use a detailed matched employee‐employer administrative dataset that follows individuals over time, allowing us to adopt a quasi‐experimental approach based on event studies around the intervention. We find that the earnings of female academics increased by around 0.62 percentage points compared to their male counterparts as the control group, whose earnings remained constant after the pay transparency intervention, reducing the gender pay gap by 4.37 per cent. Further evidence suggests that the main mechanism for the fall in the pay gap is driven by female employees negotiating higher wages, particularly among senior female academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between female pervasiveness within the entire company and firm‐risk taking. We exploit The UK Equality Act (2010), further enforced in 2017, which was made mandatory for firms operating in UK to disclose their gender pay gap. We use this measure to proxy female pervasiveness and we find it to be negatively associated with firm risk‐taking. These results are robust to several tests using female participation in each pay quartile and the difference in bonus payments between men and women. Our findings provide insights into the role played by women consistent with tokenism theory predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the introduction of the UK Gender Pay Gap Reporting legislation to large firms, defined as over 250 employees, we use linked employee–employer panel data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings to explore pre‐legislation variation in the gender pay gap by firm size. In doing so, we contribute to the evidence on the relationship between two prominent empirical regularities in the labour economics literature, namely the gender pay gap and the firm‐size wage premium. We find that both the raw and adjusted gender pay gaps increase with firm size in the UK private sector, even after controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity, consistent with the legislation being targeted effectively. However, this conclusion changes after accounting for unobserved firm‐level heterogeneity. Large firms have smaller within‐firm raw gender pay gaps and similar adjusted gender pay gaps when compared to smaller firms. Our findings are not specific to the current definition of large firms but hold more generally, including at alternative proposed size thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The unadjusted gender pay gap in general practice is reported to be 33.5%. This reflects partly the differential rate at which women become partners, but evidence exploring gender differences in GPs' career progression is sparse. Aim: To explore factors affecting uptake of partnership roles, focusing particularly on gender differences. Design and setting: Convergent mixed-methods research design using data from UK GPs. Method: Secondary analysis of qualitative interviews and social media analysis of UK GPs' Twitter commentaries, which informed the conduct of asynchronous online focus groups. Findings were combined using methodological triangulation. Results: The sample comprised 40 GP interviews, 232 GPs tweeting about GP partnership roles, and seven focus groups with 50 GPs. Factors at individual, organisational, and national levels influence partnership uptake and career decisions of both men and women GPs. Desire for work–family balance (particularly childcare responsibilities) presented the greatest barrier, for both men and women, as well as workload, responsibility, financial investment, and risk. Greater challenges were, however, reported by women, particularly regarding balancing work–family lives, as well as prohibitive working conditions (including maternity and sickness pay) and discriminatory practices perceived to favour men and full-time GPs. Conclusion: There are some long-standing gendered barriers that continue to affect the career decisions of women GPs. The relative attractiveness of salaried, locum, or private roles in general practice appears to discourage both men and women from partnerships presently. Promoting positive workplace cultures through strong role models, improved flexibility in roles, and skills training could potentially encourage greater uptake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades after the beginning of the gender revolution, most women and men still work in sex-typed occupations. This is a primary driver of the gender wage gap. Most research describing the patterns of occupational sex segregation focuses on supposedly innate job characteristics that match gender stereotypical abilities and preferences, such as the use of mathematical skills or social skills, on income and status differences between occupations, and on organizational job characteristics, for example, the need to work long hours. However, beyond such occupational attributes, sex segregation is hypothesized to exhibit emergent patterns that are linked to the interdependent job mobility of women and men, in particular, men selectively leaving feminizing occupations. Developing new tools inspired by statistical network research, and using representative, longitudinal data that contain detailed occupational mobility from the UK between 2000 and 2008, this replacement mechanism is analyzed. It is shown that 19–28% of observed sex segregation is linked to this emergent phenomenon in a statistical model that disentangles the various predictors of the allocation of women and men to different occupations. This makes it the most important predictor of segregation in contrast to concurrently modelled explanations based on occupational characteristics. The BHPS data and the LFS data are available from the UK Data Service (https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/). The O*NET data is available from the O*NET homepage (https://www.onetcenter.org/). Software implemented in the environment R and code for data analysis are available upon request from the authors. • Men selectively leave occupations entered predominantly by women. • This is robust to the inclusion of a large battery of occupations characteristics. • Thus, occupational sex segregation is an emergent process. • Analysing mobility as a network enables modelling social interdependence in occupation changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Could a salary history ban (SHB) reduce the gender wage gap? Proponents of this intervention believe the gap is sustained by the practice of eliciting salary histories from job applicants. Although observational studies suggest that SHB operates as envisioned, two features complicate the interpretation of its effects. These are, respectively, the passage of relevant legislation alongside SHB, and the presence of public campaigns that propel SHB into law. We assessed SHB in the United Kingdom, where neither potential confound was present, and did not find evidence that the intervention operated as intended. An intention-to-treat analysis of a 16-month field experiment, conducted with 230 staff hires at a private educational institution, indicates that SHB was about as likely to harm new hires as it was to help them. Additional analyses did not reveal significant differences between women and men. We supplement these results with an interrupted time series analysis of 3,687 placements made by a recruitment firm that voluntarily adopted SHB for its job candidates. Salaries were significantly lower under SHB, but were not significantly different for women versus men. Taken together, our results suggest that SHB was ineffective in isolation from contemporaneous legislative changes, proequality messaging, or some combination thereof. This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4658. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention is focused on finding ways to encourage females to study STEM in school and college, but what actually happens once women complete a STEM degree? We use the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey to trace out gender differences in STEM persistence over the career. We find a continuous process whereby women are more likely to exit STEM than men. Among STEM undergraduate degree holders, women are more likely to obtain a non‐STEM master's degree. After entering the labour market, there is a gradual outflow of females during the first 15 years post‐graduation, so that females are about 20 percentage points less likely to work in STEM than men. Conditional on leaving STEM, females are more likely to enter the education and health sectors, while males are more likely to enter the business sector, and this can partly explain the gender pay gap for STEM graduates. Overall, our results suggest that policies that aim to increase the proportion of females studying STEM may have less effect than expected due to the lower attachment of females to STEM after graduation. Such policies may need to be augmented with efforts to tackle the greater propensity of females to exit STEM throughout the career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to develop a model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of two dimensions of inequality – gender inequality and functional income distribution – and public spending, in particular on social infrastructure, on output, productivity, and hours of employment of men and women. This study estimates the model econometrically using an IV-GMM estimator and time series data for the period of 1970–2016 for the UK. For the estimation of productivity, the article uses IV-GMM estimations based on panel data for eighteen industries for the period of 1970–2015. The study finds that output in the UK is both gender equality-led and wage-led, and hence generally equality-led. Public social infrastructure investment has a high positive effect on both output and employment. Despite a strong positive effect on productivity, the employment of both men and women increases in the medium run. HIGHLIGHTS Output in the UK is gender equality-led and wage-led; hence the UK is equality-led. An upward convergence in wages by closing gender pay gaps leads to higher output. Public social infrastructure spending has a positive effect on output and productivity. Public social infrastructure leads to higher employment for both men and women. A mix of labor market and fiscal policies can achieve both equality and employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Using survey datasets, the purpose of this work explores the impact of economic freedom on the gender pay gap in the UK. Design/methodology/approach: The analysis combines Economic Freedom of the World data with the Understanding Society (USoc) Microdata series. Findings: The results document that economic freedom positively affects the gender pay gap. When the components of the index are considered, the findings indicate different effects of various types of policy, i.e. less government spending, stronger trade liberalization conditions and levels of corruption lead to higher gaps; stronger legal and property rights and a sounder money system have no impact on the gap. Moreover, a stronger impact in the manufacturing industry, part-time workers and those who work in the non-London regions is observed. Practical implications: The findings imply that reductions to government spending programmes can potentially aggravate the gap in hourly wages paid between males and females and should, therefore, be implemented. It may be also possible to provide females the training or education necessary to effectively compete in the workforce, before eliminating any spending programme they rely on. Originality/value: The first study explores the link between economic freedom and gender pay gap through a unique survey dataset with UK households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document a unique driver of consumer behavior: the public disclosure of a firm's gender pay gap. Four experiments provide causal evidence that when firms are revealed to have gender pay gaps, consumers are less willing to pay for their goods, a reaction driven by consumer perceptions of unfairness. Unlike reactions to CEO‐to‐worker wage gaps, this effect varies by consumers' gender: Compared to men, women show larger decreases in purchase intentions toward firms with gender pay gaps. Social media data, from before and after the United Kingdom legally mandated many firms to disclose their gender pay gaps, further demonstrate that gender pay gaps correlate with negative consumer reactions; once again, women are more likely than men to express negative sentiments online in response to pay gap‐related topics. Although we show that firms consumers will punish firms with their wallets, we also observe boundary conditions: When decisions incur a sufficient cost to the self—such as when needing a ride‐share when rain is very likely—the negative effects of gender gap disclosure are attenuated. This article is part of the issue "Consumer Psychology for the Greater Good" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a long record of research on the sources of the gender wage gap, a large fraction of gender wage differences remains unexplained. In this paper, we propose gender differences in social capital as a novel explanation for the gender wage gap. We use British data from the Understanding Society (UKHLS) survey and wage decompositions to estimate the contribution of social capital derived from network homophily, that is, the similarity to one's peer group, to the gender wage differential. Our results show that differences in network structure explain as much as 15% of the overall gender wage gap. This finding is largely driven by gender differences in the number of males among closest friends, while other social capital measures used in this study hardly matter. We further show that differences in returns to social capital are not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we document the evolution of the gender pay gap in the UK over the past three decades and its association with fertility, examining the role of various differences in career patterns between men and women and how they change with the arrival of the first child. We show that differences in accumulated years of labour market experience play an important role, while differences in industry, occupation, and job characteristics explain less, conditional on working experience. We develop an empirical wage model to estimate the causal effect of working experience on the wages of women. Estimates from this model are then used to simulate two counterfactual scenarios in which women who are employed always work full-time, or women's rates of both part-time and full-time work are the same as men's. We find that differences in working experience explain up to two-thirds of the gender pay gap of college graduates 20 years after the first childbirth, and that the gap is largely driven by differences in full-time experience. The role of working experience is more moderate for individuals with no college education, but it can still account for about one-third of the overall long-term gender wage gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of women in economics in the US has come increasingly under the spotlight. We exploit high-quality administrative data to paint the first comprehensive picture of the status of women in UK academic economics departments in research-intensive universities. Our evidence indicates that, as in the US, women in economics are under-represented and are paid less than men. The issues facing women in economics in the UK are similar to other disciplines, particularly STEM, but have received less national policy attention to date. We conclude with a discussion of interventions that might improve the status of women in academia and we present new evidence that a UK academic diversity programme (Athena SWAN) has narrowed the gender pay gap at a senior level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender pay gap in the UK has been persistent despite the Equal Pay Act 1970. Universities were given a positive duty to redress this in the Equality Act 2010. Some British universities introduced a system of 'professorial banding'. All professors were regraded from scratch. Surprisingly, this had almost no impact on the gender pay gap. We model how the design of the system could amplify discrimination. With individual data from one research university, we find evidence of gendered external market effects, effects of shorter tenure in the rank of professor and sticky floors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2021/37 Employer loses discrimination claim after trying to reduce gender pay gap (UK): An Employment Tribunal (ET) decision involving an advertising agency has highlighted the dangers for employers of taking an overly aggressive approach to reducing gender pay gaps. It also provides a reminder that all discrimination is unlawful, even where the victims are from a historically privileged group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women are disproportionately in low‐paid work compared to men so, in the absence of rationing effects on their employment, they should benefit the most from minimum wage policies. This study examines the change in the gender wage gap around the introduction of minimum wages in Ireland and the United Kingdom (U.K.). Using survey data for the two countries, we develop a decomposition of the change in the gender differences in wage distributions around the date of introduction of minimum wages. We separate out "price" effects attributed to minimum wages from "employment composition" effects. A significant reduction of the gender gap at low wages is observed after the introduction of the minimum wage in Ireland, while there is hardly any change in the U.K. Counterfactual simulations show that the difference between countries may be attributed to gender differences in non‐compliance with the minimum wage legislation in the U.K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Labour Force Survey is used to examine the influence of sector on the UK gender pay gap 1997–2015. The assessment is twofold: first comparing gender pay gaps within sectors and second through identifying the contribution of the concentration of women in the public sector to the overall gender pay gap. The long‐term narrowing of the gender pay gap, which predominately reflects relative improvements in women's productivity‐related characteristics, is found to stall in 2010 within each sector. This is considered in the context of claims that public sector austerity represents a critical turning point in progress toward gender equality at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision by the people of the United Kingdom ("U.K.") to leave the European Union ("Brexit") has created a renewed interest by global employers in the twenty-eight-member common market. The European Union has been constitutionally committed to the concept of equal pay based on gender since its inception in 1957, where the guarantee was first enshrined in the Treaty of Rome (1957). However, Article 157 (ex 141, 119) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union ("TFEU") is brief on the specifics as to what constitutes pay for the purposes of equal treatment. The European Court of Justice and other national courts have been called upon to address various issues including retirement contributions, part-time workers, life partnerships, gender reassignment, retirement ages, in-kind benefits, sick leave benefits, maternity leave, military leave, indirect discrimination, longevity pay, professional qualifications, and general criteria for compensation. Despite the European Court of Justice's broad definition of what constitutes pay for the purposes of gender equality, employers and member-state governments do enjoy some exceptions and discretion regarding the application of the equal pay guarantee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the gender wage gap (GWG) among PhD graduates in the UK 42 months after their graduation in 2004–5. We find a sizeable overall GWG of 19 log percentage points, which is explained by a large wage premium for men outside academia compared to women and men in academia. The GWG in academia is small in comparison. Whilst the GWG outside academia is very high six months after graduation and remains largely unaltered, the GWG inside academia doubles in the following three years. The Oaxaca decomposition suggests that for this relatively homogeneous group the GWG cannot be explained by differences in endowments (university and employment characteristics). We find stark differences in wage patterns between the fields of study and a strongly increasing coefficient effect for higher quantiles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The overall number of female consultant urologists in the UK has increased from 3% (1991) to 10.3% (2019), and although the numbers of consultants and trainees have both increased, a large gender gap still exists [2]. Mind the gap: gender trends for urology in the UK over the last 5 years (2015-2019) It is therefore a good time to make urology more accessible and interesting at medical schools and, given that 59% of this intake are women, obtaining more interaction at a grass roots level would encourage more women to take up urology, also helping us with the workforce issues of the future. [Extracted from the article]

Using the last wave of the Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, this article employs a semi-parametric decomposition method to examine the male–female pay gap over the entire conditional wage distribution of the managerial workforce in the United Kingdom. The results make clear a U-shaped pattern for the pay gap, thus showing both significant sticky floor and glass ceiling effects. The counterfactual decomposition also displays that the gap is mostly due to the difference in rewards, whose relative effect grows as we move to the upper quantiles of the whole wage distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In all 294 British participants completed a two page questionnaire entitled “How much do people earn?” Using a between-subjects design, participants either completed the male or female target questionnaire. Specifically, they were given names and age ranges (range 35–43) of people in 16 gender-neutral jobs from Accountant to Veterinarian and asked to estimate their current average annual salary. Supporting previous research, the “salary estimation effect” was found with males assumed to earn more than their female counterparts in a range of occupations, most notably in unskilled/semi-skilled jobs. Participants also demonstrated good awareness of the current average annual salary in the UK and over half of participants believed wage disparities to exist between men and women; whites and blacks. Implications for salary decision-making and perpetuation of the differential salaries afforded to men and women are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The earnings gap between male and female employees is substantial and lingering. Using linked data for Britain, in this paper we show that an important contribution to this gap is made by the workplace in which the employee works. Evidence for workplace and occupational segregation as partial explanations of the earnings gap is presented. Having allowed also for individual worker characteristics there remains a substantial within-workplace and within-occupation gender gap. The contribution of these factors, as well as the earnings gap itself, differ significantly across sectors of the labour market. The relative unimportance of occupational segregation and the large remaining gender gap suggest that stronger enforcement of equal pay legislation is likely to be the most appropriate policy response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers salary determination and the gender salary gap in the academic labour market utilizing a particularly detailed data set of academics from five old established Universities. Results reveal an aggregate gender salary differential for academic staff of 15%. Most of this differential can, however, be explained by our model. Evidence suggests a limited opportunity for female academics to combine career and family, despite the flexibility of an academic job and emphasizes the importance of mobility to the male career. Publication record is found to be an important determinant of salary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper utilises the Juhn Murphy and Pierce (1991) decomposition to shed light on the pattern of slow male-female wage convergance in Australia over the 1980s. The analysis allows one to distinguish between the role of wage structure and genderspecific effects. The central question addressed is whether rising wage inequality counteracted the forces of increased female investment in labour market skills, i.e. education and experience. The conclusion is that in contrast to the US and the UK, Australian women do not appear to have been swimming against a tide of adverse wage structure changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper utilizes the methodology proposed by Johnson and Solon (American Economic Review, 76 (5), 1117-25, 1986) to examine the impact of job segregation on the gender wage gap in the UK in 1991. The results suggest that despite implementation of the UK 1983 Equal Pay Amendment there remains clear evidence that male/female workers in female dominated jobs continue to earn less for work of 'similar worth' than their counterparts in male dominated jobs within the same firm. This conclusion is insensitive to whether one adopts an occupation or firm based measure of gender concentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the wage differences between male and female employees that persist in 1986 in Great Britain. Passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1970; Calculation of earnings differentials; Extent of wage differences for full-time employees by gender and occupation; Relationship between wages and personal characteristics.

In recent years employers in Britain have taken up equal opportunity policies more widely and structural changes in the economy have generally favored women. Against this, the pursuit of labor market deregulation is generally thought to impact adversely on women. This paper considers the changing British policy framework of the last ten to fifteen years and the effects on women's employment, highlighting differences amongst women. Deregulation and flexibilization are argued to have affected the conditions of part-time employment for women rather than its scale and pattern of expansion. The changing gender wage gap in Britain and the growth of pay inequalities amongst women are analyzed using a shift-share approach. The limited convergence in earnings between men and women is largely confined to full-time workers and has two distinct aspects. Full-time female employees have made some inroads into higher-paid occupations, but at the bottom end of the market the narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects little more than the deterioration in the position of low-paid men, relative to the median. The British case shows the limitations of an equal opportunities agenda pursued within a wider regime of burgeoning labor market inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has refined the measure of the gender wage differential in the United Kingdom labour market by merging models of occupational attainment with models of wage determination. At the same time, by focusing on wage differences between married males and females, the study fills a void in the wage discrimination literature. The method of adjusting female labour force participation by projecting backwards from a model of labour supply appears to provide a sound basis for the detailed wage comparisons. The estimates show that the earnings increment associated with years of actual labour market experience among females is comparable to that received by male workers. Years of home-time, however, are associated with a considerable reduction in earnings potential. Similar findings are obtained from analyses of occupational attainment: years of actual labour market time are associated with considerable occupational advance while years of home-time are associated with a less favourable occupational position. Married females earn around 60% of the male rate of pay. Around six-tenths of this wage gap can be attributed to differences in wage-related characteristics and the remaining four-tenths (= 14 percentage point wage differential) to discrimination or differences in preferences between males and females. Occupational segregation makes only a minor contribution to the gender wage gap. ................. These analyses also indicate that intra-occupational wage differences are more important than inequality of occupational distributions. The evidence presented in this paper is therefore consistent with research findings by Chiplin and Sloane (1975) and Greenhalgh (1980). It is also consistent with the conclusion by Brown et al. for the United States that 'eliminating differences by sex across broad occupational groups will have little impact on women's wages unless it is accompanied by changes in relative wage rates within occupations'. This suggests that futur... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]