Measures of Gender Pay Gaps Reflect The Full Extent of Workplace Discr

Question: To what extent do measures of gender pay gaps reflect the full extent of workplace gender discrimination? Answer: Measures Of Gender Pay Gaps Reflect The Full Extent Of Workplace Discrimnation The changes in the economic, social, political and demographical environment had made this complex world a difficult place to survive. What is necessary in this era is to modernize the mind set of people towards an arena where they can accept new ideologies. In India, the population is ever increasing women constituting around 48% of the Indian society. Studies revealed that the potential work force of women is half the women population. But in reality, the labor force participation for women is much lower, around 29% of the women population. This can be viewed as the fact that the glass ceiling in most of the workplaces havent shed their wings. Even now this is prevalent that women find it difficult in terms of gender-biased hiring practices to enter the workplace. Discrimination at every level of professionalism is prevalent for women. Gender inequality is something which enables to assess the labor force participation based on gender. Gender pay gap arises out of this gender inequ ality. Gender pay gap may be defined as the differences in income in the labor market between women and men in paid employment. The performance in a labor market is based on the capabilities of the labors. But it is quite common to experience a disparity in terms of wage in the labor industry. The difference in these wages is due to differences in labor productivity. But it is difficult to establish the reason why do certain workers face a disadvantage in terms of lower wage and increased risk of losing job. And it still remains groundless to explain why certain factors like gender, religion or race matter in terms of discrimination. Discrimination is defined as the differences in wages when workers have equitable productivity. The measure of disadvantage in labor market is widely categorized as pay gaps and segregation. A publication of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2009 about Global Employment Trends for Women gives us the evidence that the pace of reduction in gender pay gaps in Europe and Central Asia is slow and according to the ILO, there has been evidences that in most of the countries the wage difference in men and women has increased. The gender pay gap is an ubiquitous issue existing in all forms of labor market. Several theories have been formulated to explain the disparity in payments in the labor market in terms of gender. One such approach is the Human Capital Approach. When individuals spend money and time in purchasing goods and commodities, they extract satisfaction it which is the return on investing resources on a particular good. Likewise, individuals also spend money and time on learning and developing skill to earn a future return by increasing their productivity. This process of enhancing productivity by investment helps to gain power in the work force, of course in the future. The stock of skills and knowledge that individuals manifest which later on improves their productivity in market activities is the human capital. The human capital theory formulates that the differences in the wages for male and female are different because of the difference in the human capital accumulation. It is seen that women tend to acquire less of human capital because of traditional belief of division of labor. In earlier years women used to be confined to household chores. Their choice of going to school and gaining knowledge was of limited option. It can be seen that the women accumulated less skill and knowledge and thus they be paid less. But another analysis suggests that as the educational qualification increases the wage difference between men and women increases. There is clear evidence that for qualification upto plus 2 or equivalent, the percentage of wage pay gap is 11.54% and for post doctoral level, the percentage of gender pay gap is the highest at 180%.(Paycheck.in, 2015) The cause of a gender pay gap is not solely based on the differences in human capital. The next approach that has equally led to the gender pay gaps is the labor market discrimination. This is more like occupational segregation where the employers tastes and preferences are considered. In India, employers are prone to hire male workers rather than female workers. Employers mainly discriminates women based on their capability to work. Some employers have the perception that certain set of jobs are not for women because it requires a lot of manual and physical work which is the job of men as they are physically stronger than women. But sometimes, an employer hires a woman because she charges less than the men who charges high for the same work. Paying low wage is an objective of an employer of cost minimization irrespective of the gender. A woman, who is deprived of work everywhere, will be ready to work at low wage. Thus from here arises the gender pay gaps. According to the Bergmann, if employers start discriminating women at a large scale then women would be completely excluded from the jobs of male and a situation of overcrowding occurs in the female jobs. (Aldred et al., 2011) Empirical analysis reveals that about two-third of the gender pay gap consists of discrimination. In India, the work structure for women are basically secretaries, teachers and nurses but even these fields they are deprived of high wages. This undervaluation is because the physical requirement of the work is assessed. If the work is laborious and demands a lot of physical effort then the work is automatically allotted to a man rather than a woman. It is to be kept in mind that even if we try to establish that men and women must be treated equal, there is still this inhibition regarding the type of work. So the gender discrimination gives rise to gender pay gaps. The unpaid caring sector of women is concerned with looking after children and family. Here the woman does not choose certain occupations but the employers prefer men over women in certain work. Also the women take up the responsibility of the household chore rather than human capital accumulation which result in a low pay in the workplace. Every woman at some point or the other engages themselves in parenthood. It is the time that they choose to stay home and look after their children. This makes easier for the employer to discriminate and not offer jobs to women who are not married and have the potential to get married. As they tend to quit jobs more often. Thus discrimination comes up. Based on the analysis carried out on 16,500 online responses where 13,729 are male and 2,771 females over a period of 6 years, we see that the wage differential is highest in the year 2008 and thereafter there was reduction in this differential for the next three years. To understand the scenario of India better, the country is divided into six zones and a research was carried on. It depicted that the highest gender pay gap is for the states of Assam, Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh where females are earning 64%, 59%, 50% and 47% respectively. On the basis of zonal analysis, the west zone ranks highest in terms of gender pay gap of 47% whereas the north zone has the lowest gender pay gaps of 30.50%.(Varkkey, 2012) In most countries of the world including India, the status of women in the labour market is menial with respect to the men. It is believed that women and men have different tasks to perform and are placed in different industries. The government of India had taken several measures and initiatives to diminish this wage gap between male and female. Several acts were passed by the government to prevent the discrimination of the gender disparity in the workplace. But because of inefficient implementation, these laws could not prove to be beneficial. Women are the main problem related to the improper implementation of these laws because most of them are not aware of such legislation that are made for their protection and rights. Thus, the gender pay gap in India must be thought of appropriately. References Aldred, J., Anand, P., Dawson, G., Groom, B., Himmelweit, S., Santos, C., Simonetti, R. and Slater, G. (2011).Doing economics. Milton Keynes: Open University. Paycheck.in, (2015).Why Women Earn Less than Men, Gender Pay Gap, Pay Disparity in India - PayCheck.in. [online] Available at: https://www.paycheck.in/main/world-map-gender-pay-gap/gender-pay-gap-in-india-1 [Accessed 17 Feb. 2015]. Varkkey, B. (2012).Gender Pay Gap in the Formal Sector. 1st ed. [ebook] WageIndicator. Available at: https://www.paycheck.in/files/gender-pay-gap-in-india-2006-2013 [Accessed 17 Feb. 2015].