Labour Market Institutions and the Gender Pay Ratio

Inequalities During and After Transition in Central and Eastern Europe

“…Within the bottom 10% of earners, the share of women employed in industry is reasonably well balanced with the share of men (44% and 56%, respectively); similarly, in permanent jobs the share of women is around 55%. This means that, in the sectors/segments of the low-wage area in which unions might play a role in reducing gender discrimination, there is no room for action, since the strong presence of men earning low salaries constrains anti-discriminatory actions based on achieving comparability on a gender basis (Gregory, 1999). This is consistent with our empirical result that unions and collective bargaining do not have a significant effect on reducing the gap at the bottom of the distribution.…”

“…Inequality of earnings within the two gender groups does not appear as significantly different, with the sole exception of Romania, where the dispersion of female labour incomes is three Gini points higher than for men in both years. The small differences of the coefficients of variation of earnings between two sexes and over time, suggest that asymmetric evolutions of the shape of the distribution -particularly the increase in inequality within men only -cannot be considered as major sources of gender inequality, as elsewhere reported (Gregory, 1999). The generalised gender earnings gap decline in 2009, compared to 2007, is clearly the result of convergence between the median males' and the lowest females' earnings.…”

“…This weakness of institutions may be a consequence of the fact that the most disadvantaged workers are typically concentrated in industries just marginally covered by unions or collective bargaining (agriculture or certain services), or by higher shares of self-employment induced by push forces (Falter, 2007), as was typically the case in transition countries (Earle and Sakova, 2000). In addition, as emphasised in the literature (Gregory, 1999), in the presence of very low pay for male workers, especially for those employed in typically female occupations, the room for reducing discrimination is smaller and the role of institutions declines accordingly. The evidence on the role of labour market deregulation ( LM_dereg_male ), which in our case includes information on temporary job regulations and on minimum wage provisions, corroborates this interpretation.…”

Probing the Effects of the Australian System of Minimum Wages on the Gender Wage Gap

“…Previous evidence, such as by Gregory (1999) and Kahn (2015), shows that a more compressed wage distribution tends to go hand-inhand with a lower gender pay gap by setting an equal minimum standard for both women and men.…”

Trends in Australia's Gender—Wage Ratio

“…The concern for women's relative labour-market positions stems from their often weaker bargaining position, commonly attributed to their occupations and skills. Within Australia and internationally, it has been demonstrated that women are more likely to benefit from the protections afforded by labour-market institutions such as tribunals, legislation and collective agreements (Gregory and Ho 1985;Gregory and Daly 1992; Blau and Kahn 1993;Harbridge and Thickett 2003;Rubery 1992;Whitehouse 1992;Gregory 1999;Crockett and Preston 1999). In recent years, the concern for women's relatively vulnerable position in an increasingly individualised labour market prompted several key organisations with an interest in gender and public policy to commission a report examining the potential for data to adequately assess changes in women's wages and working conditions (Preston, Jefferson and Seymour 2006).…”