thesis subject :
Beyond figures : Understanding the factors influencing the Gender Pay Gap
Thesis start date :
1 octobre 2024
Name of thesis supervisor(s) :
Laila BENRAISS-NOAILLES & Loubna TAHSSAIN-GAY
Thesis abstract :
Discrimination seems to persist in many organizations, remaining a recurring problem despite legislative measures and policies put in place to address it (ILO, 2011). Its extent is difficult to assess (Pager, Bonikowski, and Western, 2009; Meyerson, 2000). Analyzing discrimination also involves studying the profiles of people potentially excluded from access to employment, highlighting the importance of context in this process.
American sociologist Acker (2009) addresses the phenomenon of the glass ceiling and characterizes it as “inequality regimes.” She defines the term “Glass Ceiling” as encompassing “the obstacles related to gender, race, and social class that hinder women’s advancement opportunities at all hierarchical levels.” Currently, the glass ceiling is seriously considered by the European Commission, which seeks to reduce these disparities. This effort was crowned by a specific directive aimed at balancing gender disparities in executive positions. The “Directive on gender balance in corporate boards” was published on November 22, 2022, and was praised by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in her press release. “(…) we will now have European legislation to break the glass ceiling in the boards of listed companies,” she wrote.
In the 21st century, the issue of gender equality remains unresolved. According to Insee, inequality levels progress at surprisingly slow rates. Gender roles in Western societies have been influenced by culture, religion, traditions, and the economy. The economy has been one of the main factors of inequality, discriminating against women for centuries, either by granting them lower wages or, as practiced in Victorian Britain, forcing married women to permanently leave their jobs. Today, in some African nations, a woman who has had a child may be prohibited from continuing her studies. In other parts of the world, women face a total ban on accessing education, justified by prejudices about the size of women’s brains. In some cases, a more global approach considers women’s education a waste of resources.
PhD Thesis Topic
In this PhD thesis, I aim to focus on an in-depth qualitative analysis of the factors that influence women’s income trajectories and quantify the potential loss of professional earnings due to gender and access to employment. More specifically, it aims to answer the following question: “Beyond Numbers: Understanding the Dynamics of the Gender Pay Gap and Access.”
According to Toczek, Bosma, and Peter (2021), the gender pay gap (GPG) is caused by multiple factors, including access to education and the human capital model, which bases future income on acquired experience. This model implies that future income is correlated with acquired experience as measured by the number of years of employment, which automatically excludes women from higher potential future earnings, due to the gender roles they adopt to care for their families, effectively reducing their employment duration. This happens by forcing them to opt for part-time employment, resulting in fewer days, weeks, and, in the long term, years of actual employment compared to men, who prevail in full-time employment.
This figure illustrates the income trajectories of men and women over time, based on studies conducted between 1990 and 2020. Although both trajectories show continuous growth, a slower growth in average income can be observed for women. Over this thirty-year period, men’s incomes increased on average by 60%, while women’s increased much less, averaging 40%. Given that a thirty-year period corresponds, in Western countries, to 75% of a professional career and that the trajectory of wage increase is rather linear, we cannot expect a significant increase in women’s incomes when they reach retirement age. According to Bishu and Alkadry (2017), economic reward is the most frequently measured aspect of rewards related to workplace opportunities.
The following figure illustrates the salary pyramid in France in 2021. A quick reading indicates that the income level exceeding 49% of the French population does not exceed the threshold of €2000 before taxes per month, based on full-time employment. On the other hand, the figure below clearly indicates that women are overrepresented in the category of part-time employees in France, with 26.7% for women, compared to 7.5% for men. Research on the French labor market also indicates that 80% of part-time employees are women. The cumulative impact over more than forty years of career penalizes women in terms of income and projected pensions, effectively excluding them from socio-economic prosperity in retirement. Blau (2007) confirms this gap by referring to “women who tend on average to have lower skills or to be located in less remunerative sectors of the economy” (P.845).
In an article published by Le Monde on January 13, 2024, which aggregates data sources from Insee and Drees, statistics on part-time jobs are presented. According to this article, although women represent 50% of the workforce in France, they are overrepresented in part-time jobs. Their number amounts to 80% of part-time positions, generally less well paid. This situation is attributed to gender roles, with women assuming primary responsibilities related to the care of infants, school-aged children, or sick relatives. Although this role is socially valued, it often excludes women from full-time employment, thus limiting their income capacities over the years and inevitably leading to a decrease in their purchasing power as they approach retirement.
Other factors, such as access to education, also play a crucial role in determining women’s earning capacity. Within the European Union, children of both sexes have equal access to public education. This situation varies in countries outside the EU. According to data from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, for the academic year 2021-2022, women represent 56% of enrollees, occupying more than half of the places in business, management, and accounting schools, 46% in STS but only 41% in CPGE, 40% in IUT and 29% in engineering training.
Although all boys and girls in the EU have equal access to primary education, the number of women in higher education exceeds that of men by 10.7% at the European level. This advantage, however, does not significantly influence the gender pay gap. Despite a higher overall level of education, women will continue to be less well paid than men in every European economy.
According to Insee, based on comparable job, education level, and professional experience criteria, the relative gender pay gap will be 4.3%. These data only concern full-time employment. Considering all education levels and all sectors of activity, women still earn 24.4% less than men.
All the factors mentioned above, including human capital theory (Ciminelli, 2021), access and level of education, gender roles in society that favor women as primary caregivers, and the choice, or lack of choice, in terms of part-time employment, negatively impact women’s earning capacities, income trajectories, investment opportunities, and pensions. Drees (2015) reports that in France, a woman’s average pension will statistically be 40% lower than a man’s, which not only diminishes a woman’s quality of life in retirement but also her life expectancy.
