Gender Pay Gap

The importance of knowing the causes and the evolution along history of the gender pay gap to be able to find a solution to this problem that persists worldwide

What is the gender pay gap? The OCDE defines it as the "difference between male and female median wages divided by the male median wages".(OECD 2015)

The aim of this essay is to demostrate that currently, women keep having a lower salary than men. This can be explained by a variety of factors such as discrimination, segregation in the labor market, traditions and stereotypes, the undervaluation on women´s work and the inequality of responsabilities in the family. Culture is the background of all the factors since depending on the country observed, it can be seen the different

Only between 5% and 10% of the rapes are reported because women are scared and ashamed. (BBC 2012)

Segregation in the labour market is linked with the stereotypes. Because women and men

1 choose different college majors and types of jobs after graduation. The pay gap exists in all the sectors of economy, but jobs traditionally associated are paid better than those traditionally associated with females that require the same level of skill (Hegewisch and Hartmann, 2014).

Women are under-represented in managerial and higher positions as we can see in the next graph, they occupate the lowest paid jobs. But there is already a miniority that occupates "men´s traditional jobs". (Sene 2015) The undervaluation of women´s work is an important cause because men and women doing similar jobs that require similar skills are not paid the same. For example, in a supermarket cashiers that are tend to be women are paid less than men involved in stacking shelves or in other physicall tasks.

Women have a harder experience when it comes to balance work and private life, because family care and domestic responsabilities are still not equally shared (based on the

In Spain women are a group of well educated sector of the population so their contribution to the growth of the country and to competition is fundamental.

For this reason is important to study the evolution of the gender pay gap, to understand what we can do now to equal men and women wages.

The gender pay gap in the EU varies from Estonia with 30 points, to Slovenia. The average in the Europe of the 27 was of 16.5 % in 2013 according to the data from the European Comission.

Spain is 3 points higher than this average with 19.3 % and it is the european country where the differences in salaries between men and women had increased more since the start of the crisis in 2008. Before the crisis it was 16.1%, so 1 point under the average of the EU. The tendency in most of the countries in the EU is the other way around; the salary gap becomes narrower as the years of the crisis move forward.

"Gender Pay Gap" is a program of the EU, it analyzes the characteristics of the salary differences of each country. In the case of Spain, it states that the employment rate of women in very low (50.3%), 8.5 % below the average of the EU. This is because the low number