Linnéusuniversity
Review of past and recent work on gender wage gap between the Public -‐ Private Sector
Alen Kuralić & Sara Rančigaj
2013-10-18
Examinator: Dominique Anxo
i
“But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You're looking at a guy who sat down with
Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues”. “George H. W. Bush”
Abstract The gap between male and female, so called “gender wage gap”, portrays persistent gender inequalities that exist on the labor market. In spite of more than thirty years of equal pay legislation, gap remains remarkably resilient across all continents. The former is extended as a framework for Public and Private sector differences. This short essay contributes with general overview of past and recently conducted work on the subject. However, after reviewing the some of the presented results, we find that legalization and higher return of schooling has improved woman situation on wage ladder.
Table of Content
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... i
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
Theoretical framework ............................................................................................................... 2
Gender wage gap .................................................................................................................... 2
Empirical Evidence .................................................................................................................... 4
Male Female decomposition ................................................................................................... 4
Human Capital differences ..................................................................................................... 6
Public - Private ....................................................................................................................... 7
Descriptive results ...................................................................................................................... 8
Public – Private Sector ........................................................................................................... 8
Gender wage gap .................................................................................................................. 10
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 13
References ................................................................................................................................ 14
List of Figure ............................................................................................................................ 16
List of Table ............................................................................................................................. 17
Appendix .................................................................................................................................. 18
1
Introduction
he gap between male and female, so called “gender wage gap”, portrays
persistent gender inequalities that exist on the labor market. In spite of more than
thirty years of equal pay legislation, gap remains remarkably resilient across all
continents. The recent advances in labor economic literature and the methodology for
measuring the gender pay gap only appears to underline the persistence of the disparity
between women and men’s pay. The European Member States female earnings on average are
estimated to be around 18% less per hour than male in 2012 European Commision (2013).
This disparity repeats itself across monthly and annual earnings, and subsequently into
lifetime earnings and pension entitlements, and throughout the sectors e.g. Gonzalez &
Whatts (1995), Weichselbaumer & Ember (2005), Carlsson & Rooth (2007), Laura & Moral-
Benito (2012) has down some extensive work on the prior. The wide ranging studies of
adjusted pay gap by Weichselbaumer & Ember (2005) have also found that, from the 1960 to
1990, raw wage differentials globally have dropped substantially from around 65 to 30
percent. Moreover, remarkable fact is that female earnings sporadically changed in last
decade in some western countries and few percentages of the females - which they are, have
ended up in upper wage ladder.
Nevertheless, this short essay has its start point in outlining already existing theoretical and
methodological literature on gender wage gap. Since the roots of public–private differences
originates in gender wage gap. The former will be extended as a framework for Public and
Private sector differences. The paper also provides a somewhat modest but comprehensive
picture of different dimensions in methods used to build on already existing methodology.
This enables the studies of gender inequality and its impact within and between sectors.
However to achieve these objectives, graphical figures and tables are collected from the ONS
- office of national statistics and some other sources for overawing the effects in gender wage
gap. Further, not only that paper considers problems as unequal pay and differences in the
T
2
distribution of net wage between men and women the sectoral level of the gender segregation
in the labor market will be addressed in last part of the same section. Therefore, a straight
forward interpretation of results is applied in section descriptive results.
Theoretical framework
Gender wage gap
To see how the wage gap might have developed on labor market through time we start with
deeper meaning, in sense of major events, we take brief peek at history. Since industrial
technologic development, the changes in educational system and overall improvement, the
ability of labor force have been more or less subjected to these modifications. Where, women
are much more likely to be weakest link in embracing characteristics of frequent demand
changes in labor market. The discontinuities as maternal leave, less investment in human
capital, considerable devoted time to domestic work are several constrains for ability progress
Blau & Kahn (1996). Hence, the slow female developments in labor market and resilience of
wage pay merger between genders.
To continue on previous reasoning of background ladder, but with focus shifted on economic
literature and research. The simplest of conducting the measurement between male and female
pay whether hourly, weekly, or monthly is to take average difference between men’s and
women’s earnings and compare them to each other. Thus the comparison of average wage is
of little usage because men and women tend to range differently in personal characteristics for
many of the factors that affect earning. The gender pay gap is both a simple and complex
matter. The labor-economic literature interest in gender wage differentials has been manly
focused on analysis in identifying the factors of the different wage rates received by women
and men. Theoretically the gender wage gap can be classified in to supply-side and demand-
side theories. The supply–side theory mainly consists of human capital investment and its
differences between male and female, i.e., in the past men invested more in education than
woman (given that man do not spend time in domestic-work) and received higher return in
form of a higher wage. While women were less educated or they studied in fields that usually
3
gives lower return in wage. While on the other side of intersection, that is, demand-side of the
wage gap mainly highlights different conditions that might arise between women and men in
the labor market. These differences might arise doe to social norms, social networks or in
form of several types of discrimination Becker (1994). The human capital theory suggests that
people are compensated in the work place based on their ability and skills Borjas (2000).
However, there is still deliberation over whether any of the wage gaps is due to
discrimination as well as over the extent to which women and men are forced to make certain
choices due to social pressure. For example, the differences in start of working age, part-time
work and time away from the labor market play significant role in female’s personal wage
structures.
Though, that earlier studies have shown substantial adjustments in gender pay. Taking in to
account that certain occupations might be preferred by women than others, would certainly
lead to a difference in the overall average pay of men and women in different sectors
Robinson (1998). In spite of personal, gender, social or in firm characteristics the variances in
gender wage gap also can substantially differ between the regions and sectors, e.g.
Weichselbaumer & Ember (2005). Similarly the wage determination and working conditions
of employment can also differ between countries. The usual agreement in employing the
workers in public sector is that the employees cannot be laid off just for any reason, except in
cases of violation of contract or misconduct. The life time employment and security of having
the job in public sector is standardized in many countries. However, the wage determination
of public sector relative to private sector differs in influence, whether later is affected by
market rules wage setting. In general a number of institutional, political and economic factors
contribute to the determination of public/private sector wages. In private sector employers
decide about employment and work force according to principle of maximizing profit. The
government employs workers to achieve different goals or purpose e.g. “maximizing votes,
social welfare etc.”, which significantly differs from profit maximizing goals in the private
sector. It´s also well known, that in the year of held election most countries demand for public
employees increases as well as government increases spending in public sector Reder (1975).
But during the crisis this became a big problem in countries like Spain, Greece and Italy. The
4
deficit in public debt came to the critical point leading to large layoffs and wage reductions.
For example in Spain the number of public workers was reduced almost by 12% and they
have reduced wages for 5% and 7% in 2012 in average Anton & De Bustillo (2013). The
reduction in public incomes are small in contrast to declining in economic growth during
already blown up crises, i.e., the governments have to reduce mass of the public wages to
reduce indebtedness.
The inclusion of the labor unions is crucial to the existence of a wage premium. The main
difference between public and private sector is the public sectors existence of wage premium.
There are several reasons for public wage premium: first, public sector usually does not have
any competition on the market of public services. Then again there can be some exceptions
like private education and medical services. Secondly, a government with pay premium tends
to reduce wage gap between genders. Thirdly, a highly educated people favor employment in
some occupations like education and medical services. Public sector usually has bigger power
for bargaining about wages and working conditions, doe to belonging rate of unions. This is
also concluded by economist in several European countries e.g. Gonzalo Fernández-de-
Córdoba (2012), Anton & De Bustillo (2013) Laura & Moral-Benito (2012). Non-
discriminatory pay can exist alongside a gender pay gap as long as women and men are not
evenly distributed across high and low paying sectors and occupations is one of the Robinson
(1998) assumptions.
Empirical Evidence
Male Female decomposition
In this part of the essay we are to present a short overview of measurement methods and its
expansions. We start with the basic clarification of gender comparison and later between
sectors. We will show and give explanation of selected basics of how these methods are
conducted. However, to a large degree various explanations will be exclude and certain
widening of regression routines, i.e., we won´t go in to detailed of mathematical derivations in
the wage gap on all methods only most essential. The reasons for excluding the large part of
5
equations are: First, the derivations of equations that are typically included in regressions to
explain the single methodology are simple to profound. Second, by including extensive
methods content, we would simple lose focus of the subject.
With that being said, there are several ways of measuring the differences in gender wage gap.
If we assume for the moment, that two workers female and male are employed for full-time
and that both workers generate earnings according the hours devoted to work all ells equal
“ceteris paribus”. Then taking the averages or median of those earnings for each gender group
and compering them against one another, leading to observations of possible fluctuations in
earnings. Where at the first glance this types of measures is certainly comparable with each-
other. However, obviously this modest association is nowhere near the existing literature on
methodological approach of gender wage differences, but is our first vary simple comparison.
The role of women in economic growth and the effect of development were investigated by
Boserup (1970). Thus during that period it was assumed that household compounded their
earnings and consumption in to one. The individual differences in earnings between male and
female was first conducted by Mincer (1985) “earnings function” and was constructed as
following:
𝑙𝑛𝑊 = 𝐹(𝑠ℎ𝑐𝑜𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠, 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 + 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑙 𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑏𝑒𝑠)
log 𝑦! = 𝛼 + 𝑟𝑠! + 𝛽𝐸𝑋𝑃! + 𝛾𝑋! + 𝑢!
Where the yi= earnings for individual i, Si = years of schooling for individual i, EXPi = years
of experience for individual i = AGEi – si – 6, and X= control variable such as gender, region
ect, ui as error term or residual. The first or at least one of the first more complex
methodologies of gender wage dispersion was combined out of the two ideas. The human
capital theory, that was established by Mincer & Polachek (1974) and second by Becker
(1971) the discrimination theory. Where the former theory of gender wage gap differences
explaines: “that a human-capital stock is accumulated by individuals and the difference lays in
endowment by individual characteristics” Mincer & Polachek (1974).
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Human Capital differences Similarly, as the characteristics of men and women in the labor market differ with respect to
the length of work experience, the level of education, skills, occupational status and sector of
employment are factors that in absence for better word they demanded for higher complexities
of regressions. These features are included in Oaxaca-Blinder (1973) methodology called
“decomposition technique”. The regression technique was developed by combining both
previous methods. Where, both human-capital differences and discrimination are decomposed
in two effects. Indeed they are, as shown below:
Oaxaca and Binder’s (1973) decomposition of the wage equation for men and women
𝑙𝑛 𝑤 ! = 𝑎! + 𝛽! + 𝑥! (1)
𝑙𝑛 𝑤 ! = 𝑎! + 𝛽! + 𝑥! (2)
In the first equation average wage for female is denoted as 𝑤f, index f is for female, followed
by the intercept 𝑎f and average observed characteristics of women as a 𝑥!. Second equation
it is exactly the same with the small difference in index for male.
𝑙𝑛𝑤! − 𝑙𝑛𝑤! = 𝛽! 𝑥! − 𝑥! + 𝑥! 𝛽! − 𝛽! (3)
(i) (ii)
In equation number three the first term on the right hand side denoted (i) represent the
explained part: the differences between men and women and the individual characteristics.
The second term denoted (ii) gives the unexplained part or differences in coefficient estimates
or what we sometime use to explain as a discrimination factor.
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Since decomposition of Oaxaca and Blinder’s (1973) equation, the more recent literature on
gender wage gap has added additional factors. One of these additional features is wage
structure, which is not included in equation of Oaxaca and Blinder (1973). But that has been
shown to be very important component, particularly as collective bargaining structure. The
economist Blau & Kahn (1996) argued that “to understand changes in gender pay gap fully, it
would also be fruitful to examine the impact of change in wage structure”. They also find that
centralized bargaining increases gender wage gap reduction.
Public - Private To compare the public sector and the private sector gender pay is not a straightforward task.
As we already briefly mentioned these two sectors differ in type of jobs and the characteristics
of employees within them. A number of different results can be derived depending on the
methodology that is used to calculate pay differences. We already have lined up main basic
structure of methodology for pay differential that are used to conduct the study between
governmental and non-governmental sector. Together with main methodologies, in general
we outline also the aspects that might contribute in affecting the measurement between public
and private sector.
One such type of measure is adjusting the data to take in to the account productivity or
marginal product of men and women. For instance, having the year of education or some
other similar variable and including it as proxy for the regression analysis. However, include
work related characteristics in regression does not change the measured wage gap, but the size
of the gap or changes over time might be accounted for. Thus, years of education in relation to
productivity and marginal product as well years of experience might be respectively affected
Mincer and Polachek (1974). Consequently because of differences in men’s and women’s
average pay, including the personal characteristics of measurable productivity, the overall
male/female wage gap will be influenced by the general level of wage structure in an
individual country Blau and Kahn, (1996). It has been also suggested that occupations that are
female dominated pay rather lower wages compared to their counter part of male-dominated
ones. In other words females as minority in male-dominated occupations are paid equally as
males. This is described by Bergamann (1974) as a crowding effect.
8
The discrimination theory pursues to explain whether employers choose not to employ
women in certain jobs. For example, if there is discrimination in hiring into certain
occupations, the determination of a wage gap will depend on the pay agreement for the
comparison of male and female pay. However the main measurements of the gap can be sum
up as: a) the average hourly wages comparing female average as a percentage of male average
hourly wages between sectors. b) The between countries average hourly wages, and sectoral
differences c) There diversity in the female percentages for average monthly wages between
sectors within and between countries. The usage of different approaches to conduct the
studies on wage disparities led to a large variety in final results.
Descriptive results
Public – Private Sector
The structure of appendix is used as guideline of this section i.e. following the figures from
number one to two and so on. In many OECD countries a lot of people are employed in a
large share in public sector. In France, Great Britain and Italy low skilled public sector
workers are paid more than low skilled workers in private sector. But it seems to be opposite
for high skilled workers (Lucifora & Meurs, 2006).
In year 2011 in UK worked 18 % employees in public sector (full-time 9.2 %, part-time 36.3
%) and in private sector 26.8 % (full – time 18.4 %, part – time 42.8 %). About 65 % women
work in public sector, they work especially in education and local government. In 2012 in
France was 35% in Germany, Greece and Italy 30% employed of all workers in public sector.
Interpreting the result of the Figure 1 - we can observe that employees experience a stepper
increase in annual earnings for the early working-age in both the public sector and the private
sector. At immediate start of youth employment occupation differences are significant in
choice of a sectoral employment. This is due to structural characteristics in objectives, as we
mention in previous section that private enterprises pursues to maximizing profit.
9
Additionally we see that younger people between 16 – 35 ages earns in average 2£ more in
the public sector, but we have seen before, there is more jobs in the private sector for younger
people. For workers between 35 – 50 years old is earning similar between public and private
sector. More important is that people between 50 – 64 years earn on average 2£ more in the
public sector as in private sector. The earning seams to stagnate for those that are 30-50 of
age, average mean of hourly earnings seams to peak in the early forties in both sectors. The
earning over the life cycle theory suggests diminishing returns to earnings in later part of life,
which can be observed here as decline with starting point at around fifty years. The notable
difference is that decline happens earlier in the private sector than in the public sector. It is
reasonable to assume that higher wage of public sector is main occasion to early leave in
private sector given that worker earns two thousand pounds more per year in public sector at
55 of age.
The following - figure 2 – has age as a proxy for the experience. This is expressed in percent
change of age/experience and as well as distributed between sectors. The presumable outcome
that we can expect, those that are older earn more than young i.e. older people have more
experience, and thus higher return earning. Indeed that is what we find by observing left and
right part of the graph. The public sector generally consists of an older workforce and account
approximately for 5% of employees. Around 45% of public sector workers are aged 35 to 49
compared to 15% of employees in the private sector aged 16 to 24 and around 38% of private
sector workers that are in middle age. The reasons behind this simply that younger people
tend to change job more frequently in early part of career life, while older seek more security.
Some reasons might be due to the better bargaining power of the unions and they have more
rights and higher wages.
Another characteristic which determine wages, is the level of qualifications of the employee.
In figure 3 the pay differences by qualifications levels we see that up to the higher
qualification level on average public-sector employees earn more than the private sector.
Employees with higher level of qualifications earn more, than employees with lower level of
qualifications when we consider public sector that has a higher qualified workforce than the
private sector. A higher qualified workforce would, on average, receive higher pay than a less
10
qualified workforce. The other factors can explain these differences than the qualifications,
for example, the types of occupations which we explained earlier. The similar case is
Australian public-private wage gap table eight, where certain measures are excluded as the
part time and overtime payments. There, we can perceive shorter period of time over
fluctuation in sectoral dissimilarities, but is more recent and stretches between 1994 -2012.
For the Australia persistency is similar as in Europe. Between 1994 and 2012, the gender
wage gap remained within a range of 11 and 21 percent. In November 1994, the gender pay
gap between sectors was around 10%. The closest number in closing the gap that we could
observe was in November in 2003 with mare 4 percent in difference.
Another important thing is when comparing the pay gap between two sectors as a pay
distribution of employees is skill characteristic. To illustrate this, the table 1 tabulates a
random selection of people which work in the public and private sector and are divided by
skill endowments. The obvious fact in dissimilarity is that those that possess middle and high
skill tend to work in public sector. Further, in charts 5 and 6 it is highlight the proportion of
full-time women and men and earnings distribution. The analysis of the table’s shows clear
evidence that females is more modestly spread over the earnings both in public and private
sector. But then again, as in previous observations they are placed in lower part of the wage
distribution ladder respectively. The difference is also larger in the private then it public
sector. Those as we earlier communicated about martial leave and absence from the job being
the possible factors of the gender gap. Here it confirmed in shape of part time work as an
alternative, where woman are willing to take the jobs that are less skilled and lower in wage.
Gender wage gap
Nevertheless, to observe how the gender wage gap is distributed in UK labor market across
twenty different occupations we take a peek at figure nine. The most observable difference is
in occupations that are employed by managers, chief executives, drives and sales personal
where women earn 25 -33 % less than males. The low-wage jobs as drivers and sales persons
seem to be in general male dominated, and the 0.5 % portion is shared by females. For the
higher educated occupations that number increases between 25-45 percent, surprisingly it is
here that we find the largest gap between male and female for UK. Since, the number of
11
females that share the profession of manager increases to 45 percent, we would expect slow-
down in wage gap. However, essentially the female dominated jobs shape the wage gap in
favor of females for the UK labor market. In contradiction to this, the gender wage gap seems
to be bigger in Australia as it is shown in Figure 4 for public sector, with disadvantage for
women. As we have mentioned before the reason or reasons for this gap could be absence in
education i.e. might be doe to simple reason that women invest less money in education than
men, also men can be more motivated and efficient, as well as possibility that maybe men
engage in work that is more demanding and consists with heavy responsibilities. The second
reason is that women usually interrupt they career because of maternity leave and they take
care of the family and that decreases their earnings. As is it is seen, in year 1994 we could
observe bigger wage gap in gender, which has decreased (20 percentage points) in 10 years,
but it has also developed in to even higher from 2006 to 2012 (one of the implications to this
could be recent recession). The gap in public sector is not so large, because we mentioned
before - but we only can assume -, because of available data that we have for Australia where
the share of public sector is 16,4 % of total jobs it seems that government reduces wage gaps
between gender with wage premium and smaller wage gap in public sector, it visibly
decreases wage gap in all sectors.
This confirms the theory of Bergmann (1974) that occupations that are female dominated pay
rather lower wages compared to their counter part of male-dominated ones, also that
occupations with lower rate of female employees seem to have discriminatory impact. To get
broader comprehension how the female wage gap as percentage of males has developed over
the years we use figure 6 for the US labor market as support. The gender earnings ratio graph
shows that a woman would earn roughly 62 percent of male wage in 1955. However in 2010
the ratio increased to around 75 percent of male earnings. The overall gender wage
inequalities overtime shows steady convergence. But then again the positive narrowing of the
wage gap that stretches over 55 years and gets 13 % closer to the male wage, can’t be that
exacting. The differences between EU-27 countries can be observed in figure 7 which
overviews the changes in gender gap in average gross hourly earnings. The substantial
differences are notable, for example Estonia´s pay gap stand out for itself with almost 31
12
percent, while Italy-Portugal are ranging less than 10% and Luxemburg, Latvia, Netherlands
Finland are around 20 percent. The average wage gap ranges about 17.5 percent across OECD
27 countries. Beside that a lot of women in public sector earn less than £ 600 per week and
which is significant gap between man and women, man earn a lot more up to £ 1000 per
week. Those we can compare and see that in UK it is not a big difference between public and
private sector, because a significant part of women earns less than £ 400 per week and also we
have a big difference between women and men that earn £ 1000 per week (see Figure 7 and
8).
For example, women that are low-wage takers are better off to work in the public sector, but
on other hand for the men it is better to work in private sector, if they are high educated
because they will get higher wages. In general, institutional differences in wage regulation
seem to play an important role: in Italian and French labor market sectors, as well as
collective bargaining and union presence contributes to higher wages for public sector
employees which explains the reason behind the largest part of the pay gap. The opposite
applies in Great Britain, decentralization in wage setting and higher employer discretion in
wage setting contribute to increase pay dispersion as well as public – private wage
differences. (Lucifora & Meurs, 2006).
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Conclusion
In this short essay we covered gender wage gap and public-private wage differentials out of
theoretical and methodology perspectives in labor economics. Some previous work has found
positive evidence between male/female pay in private-public sector. While the others argue
that a construction and gathered data used in research might be slightly misleading.
Throughout the overview of the extensive literature and data analyses of different authors
focused us to one conclusion. That wage gap exists in all sectoral dimensions and also in all
countries over the globe. Subsequently when taking in to the account crowding effect and
labor-union the pay gap between governmental and non-governmental segment, the females
seem to be better off by working in public segment. Nevertheless their average earning is still
to a certain degree lower than for men.
What more we observe is that even when gender pay by occupation is clear, in comparing
comparable jobs, there tend to remain some differentials in measurement. The differences in
the average pay of men and women in the same occupation can arise from a number of
causes. Some may result from the use of different measures of pay. Women typically work
fewer hours than men and they usually do less overtime hours than men. Average monthly or
weekly earnings may therefore differ because men work more or different hours than women.
This might affect average hourly earnings, still to a lesser degree, then spread over both
normal and overtime hours.
According to gathered data/figures of our choice, the wage gap in public sector remains
resilient in its nature to change in closing the wage gap. The Empirical evidence shows us that
the public sector is in a lot of cases (like Spain, France, Italy) a fair employer reducing both
pay differences by gender and compressing pay dispersion with according to the private
sector. On the other hand we saw that the public sector pays more, with the wage premium to
low skilled labor while high skilled workers in public sector suffers penalty.
14
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List of Figure Figure 1. Mean hourly earnings by age 16-64 in the public and private sector (2011), UK .... 18
Figure 2. Percentage of workers by age 16-64 in the public and private sector (2011), UK ... 19
Figure 3. Average public/private sector pay gap by qualification (2011), UK ........................ 19
Figure 4. Gender pay gap by sector, 1994 to 2012 in Australia ............................................... 20
Figure 5. Gender composition and gender pay gap .................................................................. 21
Figure 6. The Gender Earnings Ratio, 1995-2010, Full-Time Workers U.S. .......................... 22
Figure 7. Changes in the female wage ratio over countries 2008 EU 27 ................................. 22
17
List of Table Table 1. Percentage of employees by skill level in the public sector and the private sector,
April 2011, UK ......................................................................................................................... 23
Table 2. Some differences between public and private sector in different countries ............... 23
18
Appendix
Figure 1. Mean hourly earnings by age 16-64 in the public and private sector (2011), UK
Source: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings - http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ashe/annual-
survey-of-hours-and-earnings/index.html
0.00 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00 10.00 12.00 14.00 16.00 18.00 20.00
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Public sector
Private sector
Age
Earning £/ hour
19
Figure 2. Percentage of workers by age 16-64 in the public and private sector (2011), UK
Source: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) - Office for National Statistics -
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/public-and-private-sector-earnings/november-2012/rpt-
public-private-pay.html?format=print
Figure 3. Average public/private sector pay gap by qualification (2011), UK
Source: ONS Labor Force Survey - http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/public-and-private-sector-
earnings/november-2012/rpt-public-private-pay.html?format=print
0.00
0.50
1.00
1.50
2.00
2.50
3.00
3.50
4.00
16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 58 60 62 64
Public sector
Private sector
-‐6.0
-‐4.0
-‐2.0
0.0
2.0
4.0
6.0
8.0
10.0
Degree or equivalent
Higher educaLon
A Level or equivalent
GCSE or equivalent
Other None
Pay gap
20
Figure 4. Gender pay gap by sector, 1994 to 2012 in Australia
Source:http://parliamentflagpost.blogspot.se/2013/03/women-in-australian-workforce 2013.html
Figure 5. Private sector distribution of gross weekly earnings for full – time employees in 2011
21
Figure 6. Public sector distribution of gross weekly earnings for full – time employees in 2011
Figure 7. Gender composition and gender pay gap
Source: http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/tag/occupations/.
22
Figure 8. The Gender Earnings Ratio, 1995-2010, Full-Time Workers U.S.
Source: http://www.iwpr.org/blog/2011/04/07/visualizing-the-gender-wage-gap/
Figure 9. Changes in the female wage ratio over countries 2008 EU 27
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EU_27_Gender_Pay_Gap.001.png
23
Table 1. Percentage of employees by skill level in the public sector and the private sector, April 2011, UK
Skill-level Public sector Private sector High skill 30 26
Upper middle 29 23 Lower middle 32 37
Low skill 9 14 Source: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings based on the Standard Occupational Classification (Soc. 2000)
Table 2 Some differences between public and private sector in different countries
Wage gap
between public
and private sector
Penalty or
premium
Higher wages
has penalties,
lower wages
has premium
Did Great
recession
make
consequences
on wages in
public
sector?
Wage gap
between gender
Spain Yes Penalty and
premium
Low skilled
works get
premium, high
educated
suffer penalty
Yes, they
downsized
the workers
Females get
premium to
decline a gap
24
Italy Yes, pay gap is
smaller because
pay formation is
more regulated
Penalty and
premium
Low skilled
workers get
premium, high
educated
suffer penalty
They
downsized
the workers
in public
sector.
Females get better
paid in public
sector and males
are better paid in
private sector
Netherlands Yes, but on
opposite to the
other countries is
that private sector
wages are higher
form public sector
wages from year
1980.
Premium get
women with
lower
education in
public sector in
average from
1980 there´s
not premium in
public sector
but they have
penalties
Lower or
medium
skilled get
premium,
highly
educated get
penalties.
They froze
current
wages and
they didn´t
bargain about
new
collective
agreement.
In public sector is
larger amount of
women and it is a
difference for
women, because
the wage gap is
bigger between
public and private
sector for them
France Yes, pay gap is
smaller because
pay formation is
more regulated
Penalty and
premium
Low skilled
works get
premium, high
educated
suffer penalty
They
downsized
the workers
in public
sector.
Females get better
paid in public
sector and males
are better paid in
private sector
UK Yes Penalty and
premium
Low skilled
works get
premium, high
educated
suffer penalty
Wages fell
down in
March 2009
for 7 percent
points
Females get better
paid in public
sector and males
are better paid in
private sector
Source: (Anton & De Bustillo, 2013), (Lucifora & Meurs, 2006), Eurostat 2012, (Berkhout
Ernest, 2012)
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