Gender Discrimination in the British Labour Market: A Reassessment

For the first time, nationally representative data on women's employment histories are used to study the gap between women's and men's pay in Great Britain. It is decomposed into a gap attributable to gender differences in human capital characteristics (such as education, work experience, and time spent out of employment by women), and a gap attributable to gender discrimination. Using data collected in the 1980 Women and Employment Survey, we find that women's wages would be between 20 and 25 per cent higher in the absence of discrimination. This is somewhat higher than previous estimates have indicated.

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