BUSINESS

Women in Business

Women in Business

Introduction

Through the variety of statistical sources and methods of measurement, it seems fairly clear that the pay gap between men and women declined between the 1970s until the early 1990s. Since that time, the declining gap appears to have slowed and the average salary of women is generally 27% lower than men. This overall difference is not specific to France, as evidenced by a very detailed analysis carried out within the European Union, it is found in other countries and in similar proportions. This difference corresponds only partly to discrimination themselves. Some analyzes developed during the hearings conducted by the Senate delegation, wage inequality sometimes correspond to professional strategies and life choices different gender. However, an anomaly must be stressed: while young women today are better educated than men (in France, 24% of working women, against 21% of men, have a level of degree and above), their better performance in school and university courses no longer expressed, for ten years, despite the progress of legislation, by reducing the pay gap. These are due essentially to the one hand, in a de facto segmentation of jobs and, secondly, in the courses of professional careers:

The labor market is, first, a compartmentalized market: 60% of female jobs are concentrated in six occupational groups which represent only 30% of total employment. The subdivision of occupations in addition the existence of sectoral differences in wages: the highly feminised sectors (textile, personal and household services, retail, hotels and restaurants) offer low-skilled jobs and wages are often less than elsewhere; in addition, the career of women is more discontinuous than men: women are more exposed to career breaks (for maternity leave and child-rearing, but also possibly to follow their spouse in the event of job transfer, arbitration between the careers of spouses being most often in favor of the husband) and are, moreover, for family reasons even less mobile than men, while many promotions going through a mobility professional or geographic as well should they give up their training opportunities that seem incompatible with their time, slowing their careers compared to men of equivalent qualifications.

Throughout the European Union and the United States is assigned a wage gap of about 6% to the effect of job structure and another similar to the differences in career. There is, therefore, beyond the 12%, a residual difference: under identical conditions (post, qualification, corporate, regional, etc.) remains a wage difference between men and women (the "gender gap" Anglo-Saxon) of 15% (Werhance, 2007, pp. 78).

Women and Varying Wage Structure

In its report of 8 June 2001 on equal pay for work of equal value, the Commission on Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities of the European Parliament has analyzed the wage gap between the sexes. In the European Union, two separate statistical sources are used to identify differences in pay between the sexes: the Survey on Wage Structure and the ECHP European Community. According to data collected by the Survey on wage structure, the pay gap was 27% in 1995, that ...