Research Paper Example: Gender Wage Gap in Different Countries

For many years women have been fighting for equality in so many different areas. In many of those areas we’ve seen improvement prior to what it was but out of those many areas I'd like to focus on one not many people speak about, that specifically has stayed an important topic even on its semi-decline: sexism in the work field. . Since the 1900’s there have been various articles researching this subject, these studies have broken down specific subtitles within this branch such as: work effort, maternity leave, country variations and more reasons that this gap has been so hard to change and still prominent throughout these years. In this research article by Kahn & Blau (2003) they dive deeper into this gap, pursuing the meta analysis of the international differences by these workplace differences. Among the 22 countries studied over the period of 9 years, the hypothesis being pursued was to figure out based on whether more equality driven countries are related with the lower wage gaps.  More contributions of this study would occur such as the ability to approximate the persistent requests in the female labor market and again the country's wage gap Kahn & Blau (1995). The figures on multiple workers studied made the researchers recognize the major differences and adjust their data on global differences in women’s work environment on approximating the gender wage gap, this is a significant step in singling out the cause and  the influence of the gender wage structure. We’ve seen various laws set into place such as the Equal Opportunity Law (EEO), Civil Rights Act of 1994, and other discrimination laws mainly based in the United States, but in other countries it these laws in action may not be the same. Staying in the study, the European countries featured in this study were: Russia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, there are reports that under leftism in mainly Eastern European countries and and countries that were apart of the Soviet Union the government vouched for equal work opportunities between gender and is very set on making the gender gap not even be a problem and topic in their own countries, interestingly women were actually pushed to join the workforce based off these laws welcoming them to those fields, Brainerd (2000). Out of these countries the country that has the strongest policies against discimniation laws standing up for women is Australia, they have implemented multiple laws and policies which has led to crucial involvement with women feeling wanted and comfortable in their work environment. Based on the data combined from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and development (OCED) articles,  South Korea is one of the biggest countries under the umbrella with an astounding economic growth, a employment rate of 74%, and a very stable and high education rate but behind those numbers, the wage gap in this country has merely been narrowed down with a wage gap of 39% highlighting the astonishing differences between South Korea and various other countries among the OCED. Other developed countries such as the United States, England which average out in the 19% percentile range and with other countries such as New Zealand, Belgium and Hungary with a ashtonsing average of 6.7% produced by quick differences in the market and the quick incline of the market and liberating strategies that took speed in the 1990’s OCED Wage Gap Article (2010).  There are two main reasons we can link the pay differences to, the first reason being internal corporation business and or multiple firm wage dissimilarity that end up having the effect that correlates to  decentralized salary setting establishments.  Consequently, because of these establishments, which lessen the area of the differences between salaries nationwide corporations , and are more than likely to decrease the gender wage gap,bringing them closer to equality. Another point that supports this statement is,  based on the fact that in all countries worldwide, the average female salary differentials is very much underneath the male differentials , this can be linked to  the multiple firm systems that continuously improve the minimum wage pay grade, not putting gender into account, which will lead to the dropping of male‐female wage distributions, Machin and Manning (1994); Card and Krueger (1995) ; Katz, Loveman, and Blanchflower (1995); DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux  (1996) Dolado et al. (1996). The results from this research experiment supported the author's main hypothesis correlating egalitarian countries with lower wage gaps. Based on the numbers such as Slovenia having .14% and Japan having a .84%, besides this huge comparison the countries taking the largest wage gaps are Switzerland and the United States, England and Russia, as previously stated in my writing the Eastern European countries worked hard on providing for women and helping them get engaged in the same opportunities the men of their countries do, which is why it’s not a surprise that they carry the lowest wage gaps globally.  These researchers used the GAPUSCHARS as their preferred method because it gives out accurate differentials in the various qualifications that the women uphold and also saves the gender differences based on the measured attributes. Based on the western countries that were studied, the set of  percentages of the dissimilarity between the yearly average of Western countries of GAPUSCHARS and the independent country's GAPUSCHARS that is taken check by for each independent variable. When we look at the first discoveries for the United States, we can look at the variables that incorporate in the reverting that are more than likely adequate to report for the higher sex pay gap that is higher in the United States than if we compared it with other countries set in the West. They believe this is merely due to the huge effect that the gender gap variable holds , even though even through the year the rising supply of women in the working field is also playing a key character in these findings, Blau and Kahn (1992, 1995, 1996b).

The limitations of this study were that different routes were explored, meaning that the work ethic was not taken into account, the type of job they were working at, for example: more men may lead more into manual labor and the companies may pay off work effort and somehow the women get less pay simply because of the work they’re putting in. Another limitation is that they could have included more countries, also countries that are more notorious for not upholding gender equality and treating women horribly such as: India, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Nigeria and etc, incorporating this would lead to further support of the hypothesis because since these countries don’t support equality as per say Eastern European countries their wage gap would be higher. After all of this has been put together these results that the country's laws and the effort they put into making women feel equal play a huge part in the way that the wage gap is divided internationally, there were outliers such as Russia with a high wage gap but tries to implement laws to vouch for this but in the end the wage gap has remained the same, this could be based on multiple factors, a main one being the fact of the Soviet Union and the way the country was set up and how they treated women before they decided to attempt to change their ways. Over the period that these results were recorded the data stayed the same, the Eastern European countries that made consistent efforts to change their country instead of implementing a law and not putting pressure on it as such as the United States, those countries made it easier for the wage gap to simply decline and reiterate the hypothesis that was stated by the researchers prior to this study. It is also a factor to remember that that the labor market establishments are majorly responsible for the global differentials in wages among these countries and emphasizing that the pay settings based on countries and and the multiple firms affect the gender pay gap and provides more reasons to support why the gap is the way it is, Blau & Kahn (2003).