Gender pay discrimination examined

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It is estimated that the average pay of women in Spain is around 30% lower than that of men in 2001, though gaps in the existing statistics make research in this area difficult. We examine the statistical problems and outline the competing interpretations of the meaning of gender pay differentials, drawing on recent research.

There is a general consensus that women suffer discrimination in the Spanish labour market. All the items that are habitually used to measure the employment situation show women to be in a worse position than men: they have a smaller presence on the labour market; they suffer greater unemployment; they are over-represented in temporary employment; and they earn lower wages than men.

On this last point, the study of pay and of gender pay differentials in Spain is complicated by a lack of sufficiently complete statistics. The source most commonly used to study wages is the Survey of Wage Costs (Encuesta de costes salariales, ECS), which is a quarterly survey of wages paid in companies. The information obtained from the ECS differentiates only between manual workers and white-collar workers, and does not include all sectors of activity (in particular it does not include the public sector and provides little information on the subsector of personal services) or the smallest companies (companies with fewer than 10 workers and establishments with fewer than five workers). This means that women are under-represented in the survey, because a larger proportion of them work in the public sector, in services and in small companies.

The configuration of the ECS sample makes it impossible to explore the relations between gender and pay in detail. For this reason, the most detailed studies of the issue have used alternative sources: the Wage Structure Survey (Encuesta de estructura salarial, EES) and the Family Budget Survey (Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares, EPF). The EES is a survey carried out through direct interviews but it excludes practically the same groups as the ECS. It also has the drawback that it was only carried out once in 1995 and has not been continued. The EPF determines the consumption of families in order to draw up the Retail Prices Index. The advantage of this survey is that the sample includes the groups excluded from the other two, but it is oriented more towards discovering patterns of expenditure than income, and it was last carried out in 1991. In considering the pay situation of women, one must take into all these limitations into account.

Pay discrimination against women

The studies that have been conducted on the basis of the abovementioned statistical sources indicate that the average pay of women is 33% to 25% lower than that of men. The differences are due to the sample chosen and how the results are calculated, but if one takes into account the limitations of the statistics, and in particular the under-representation of small companies and services, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that the real difference is about 30%. It is interesting to note that this difference seems to be constant over time in all studies based on different sources. In the cases in which information was available on wages in the public sector (basically the studies based on the EPF and a study conducted in Catalonia, combining the data of the EES with direct information on the public administration) it was found that, although pay differentials are smaller in the public sector than in the private sector (the difference is 13%-15%), this does not have a substantial effect on the total figures.

The debate on pay discrimination

Though no one questions the existence of gender pay differentials, they are interpreted in very different ways. The differences in interpretation are over what should be considered as wage discrimination. For authors using a "neo-classical" economic approach, the term discrimination should be applied only to differences in pay that cannot be explained by "objective" differences of another type, such as the level of education, the sector of employment and the type of occupation (examples of this approach are: "La participación laboral femenina y la discriminación salarial en España", G Moreno, JM Rodríguez and J Vera, Consejo Económico y Social, Madrid, 1996; "Los salarios en España", S Pérez Camarero and A Hidalgo, Argentaria/Visor, Madrid, 2000; and "Análisis de la discriminación salarial", S Pérez Camarero and A Hidalgo, in VII Jornadas de Economía Crítica (CD-ROM), Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, Albacete, 2000). For other analysts, pay differentials are a reflection of the different types of discrimination that women suffer in the labour market and should not be considered separately (see, for example: "Empleo y discriminación salarial", C Martin Urriza and L Zarapuz Puertas, Secretaria Confederal de la Mujer de Comisiones Obreras, Madrid, 2000; and "La desigualtat salarial a Catalunya", A Gil, J Gonzalez Calvet and P Mir, in 2n Simpossi sobre les desigualtats socials a Catalunya, Fundació Jaume Bofill, Barcelona, 2001).

The defenders of the first approach break down the pay differences into those that can be explained by the different positions occupied by women and those that cannot. Insofar as Spanish women on the whole have a lower level of formal education, occupy more jobs in sectors with lower wages (such as textiles/clothing, catering and retail), have jobs of less responsibility and have less seniority, it is thus justifiable if they receive lower wages than men. However, all these differences only explain approximately half of the total differential, so the level of "simple" wage discrimination would still be 12.5%-15%.

The alternative interpretation takes a different approach to discrimination. It takes into consideration the fact that not only do women receive different wages than men for the same jobs, but that they are located in different areas of work. The low wages of some sectors, from this approach, depend more on the fact that women form the majority of the workforce than on a strict comparison of productivity: all low-wage sectors, with the exception of agriculture and timber, have a majority of female employees. The lower representation of women in posts of responsibility, or simply at higher professional levels, is explained more by a persistent limitation on women's promotion imposed by men than by factors inherent to the women concerned. In fact, women are over-represented among professionals and technicians but far fewer of them reach posts of greater responsibility (which explains the persistence of wage differentials in the public sector, which employs most women with higher education). The greater presence of women in temporary employment (which means that they have less seniority) and in part-time employment shows a clear situation of discrimination in comparison with men, according to this perspective. This is significant because the hourly wage for part-time workers is in all cases lower than that for full-time workers in the same category, but this difference is greater among women (17%) than among men (8%). Although most part-time jobs are held by women, the statistics for Spain show that most women are not in these jobs by choice but rather due to the characteristics of the occupation or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

Commentary

The second position outlined above is supported by two other factors. First, though pay discrimination is prohibited in Spain and its elimination has been one of the main issues of collective bargaining, in most of the major court cases concerning wage discrimination - such as those involving the motor components company, Magnetti Marelli, and the perfume company, Antonio Puig- the companies were found to value the jobs of men and women differently. In some of these cases, the men and women involved were members of different trade unions, and the trade union with male membership had signed the relevant collective agreement; nevertheless, the women were able demonstrate that the companies had discriminated against them. Second, an analysis of wage discrimination by professional groups shows that it is lower in professions requiring a high level of education that are found mainly in the public sector (such as medicine and teaching) and higher in those that are mainly in the private sector (such as economic analysis and engineering). This indicates that a large part of the pay differential is explained by different social practices rather than by different qualifications.

Though in the past few years Spanish women have made an enormous effort in improving their educational levels, changes in public policies (privatisation) and a more flexible work organisation that has increased the discretionary powers of management may explain the persistence of major differences in pay between men and women (Albert Recio, QUIT-UAB).