Causes, solutions leave maze of trails for gender pay gap

Recently, Business Day editor Lukanyo Mnyanda asked me to investigate the gender pay gap in SA, and as a result I spent a difficult week trying to get some kind of factual breakdown of what the situation actually is.

The numbers were hard to come by, and even more difficult to assess, but the story duly appeared in July. This being Women’s Month, I thought I might reflect a little on the results here.

I have to say it was an education doing the story, not because it revealed the level of discrimination — I think that is pretty much a given — but because the reasons for it and available remedies are so complicated.

The first point to make is that the data suggests a difference of about 15% in most countries in the world, including SA, between likefor-like work, calculated on an hourly basis.

The second point to make is that this difference is coming down, and in many European countries the gap is now quite small.

Is a 15% gap high or low? Frankly, I expected it to be higher. The gap is, in fact, higher on a total basis; that is if you just take the total earned and don’t factor in the hours worked.

THE GAP IN SA

In SA, the gap is around 23%; internationally it can go up to 35% on this measure.

I also expected SA to be worse than many developed and developing countries, but surprisingly, to me at least, this does not appear to be the case.

The World Economic Forum released a gender gap report in 2017, which blends work, education, health and politics and puts SA 19th out of 144 countries. That’s roughly the same as Germany and France, and better than Switzerland.

There is a big difference in employment levels in both the public and private sectors, and that split gets bigger as the jobs get more senior.

SA’s Commission for Employment Equity 2016/2017 report puts the gender split at the senior management level at 39% female in the public and 31.5% in the private sector.

At the top management level, men dominate even more markedly, with only 30% and 20% of women in the public and private sectors, respectively.

Interestingly, if you separate out the professionally qualified category, women outnumber men in the public sector, presumably because of the preponderance of women teachers and nurses.

In the private sector, men predominate in this category but less so than in top management.

In some ways, the wheel is beginning to turn dramatically. In the US, for example, women are now the majority of the workforce and outnumber men at universities.

In a sense, there is a new crisis of men’s numbers emerging in the US, with so many formal, industrial jobs disappearing to Asia.

Developed economies are moving towards the traditionally feminine skill set in the service economy.

SA is seeing some of this trend too, particularly with the disappearance of jobs in the mining, manufacturing and construction sectors.

The most revealing to me were the reasons for the enduring differences.

Women’s advocates claim the difference is based on prejudice, and I presume there is a lot of that going around. But there are more benign reasons too.

THE WHEEL IS BEGINNING TO TURN DRAMATICALLY. IN THE US, FOR EXAMPLE, WOMEN ARE NOW THE MAJORITY OF THE WORKFORCE

Men tend to do more dangerous work, and their compensation is often boosted as a result.

An interesting explanation is that men are generally starting more enterprises, some of which succeed, of course, and that also tends to skew the numbers.

LIFE-WORK BALANCE

But these problems are outweighed, I suspect, by the desire of many women to keep a better life-work balance, if you want to put it that way.

Because women are still doing most of the housework and child-rearing, they tend to self-select flexible working hours and are happy to take a salary cut to achieve that end. There is also some evidence that women don’t negotiate for salary increases as hard as men do.

I suspect the gender pay gap and the proportion of women in the workforce are related issues, and the increasing number of women in formal work will help to even out the discrimination over time. But the problem of men starting more businesses is going to be more difficult to put right.

In the meantime, I think business needs to look to its laurels and business leaders need to make sure they are promoting equally and are keeping tabs on aggregate pay levels and trends within the organisation.