CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Rumpler, Birgit |
|---|---|
| Title | Equal pay for equal work? The development of the Austrian gender pay gap before and during the pandemic |
| Summary | On September 18th, the world "celebrates" international equal pay day. The international payday aims to raise awareness for the fact that women earn significantly less than men across the globe. At the same time, the international equal pay day promotes a multitude of policies reducing this gender pay gap. Up until this day, Austria reports on of the highest gender pay gaps in the European Union despite decreasing trend over the past decades (Statistik Austria nd). The aim of this paper is to empirically analyzes the gender pay gap specifically for Austria in more detail with an OLS regression using EU-SILC data from the year 2018 & 2021, testing the hypothesis on whether or not women receive equal pay for equal work. This empirical analysis is new in the academic literature as there is no previous research on the years 2018 and 2021 using Austrian EU-SILC data. What is more, this paper examines how the gender pay gap has developed during the pandemic in comparison to the pay gap in 2018. The empirical analysis finds a raw gender wage gap of over 40% and an unexplained gender wage gap of 10.6 % for 2018. For 2021, the raw gap decreased to 37.5 % during COVID-19 whereas the remaining gender gap increased to 11.9%. The raw gender wage gap reports differences in average monthly net wages of males and females without accounting for any wage characteristics whereas the unexplained gender wage differential is attributed to unobserved or non-measurable female characteristics after accounting for major wage determining variables such as education, hours worked, job sector, health indicators and work experience. Lastly, policy recommendations such as transparent payroll data and gender sensitive parental leave schemes are discussed in more detail as possible remedies towards decreasing the gender wage gap. |
| Supervisor | Akbar, Yusaf H. |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/rumpler_birgit.pdf |
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