Originally published here.

Why is there still a gender pay gap in Britain? What are its components? There have been major changes in gender relations and the structuring of the labour market, including anti-discrimination legislation, the closing of the gender education qualifications gap among young people, and increased paid statutory maternity leave. This study utilises the capacity of the British Household Panel Survey both to differentiate between the different types of employment experienced by women,over a life-time and to include labour market factors. We show that educational levels, today, differentiate between women and men only a little. We demonstrate that part- time work is better understood as a site of cumulative,disadvantage in the acquisition oftraining and human capital, than as a current location of additional discrimination. Weshow,that not only is full-time employment ,experience a key ,source of wage advantage, but that even short interruptions to employment for family care have a substantial additional negative impact on wages. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of using,an ontology,of gender,that has more depth than those previously used in the quantitative analysis of the gender wage gap. Key words: Employment, gender, ontology, pay, quantitative 3 The UK Gender Wage Gap And Gendered Work Histories.

There has been little change in the full-time gender pay gap since the mid 1990s and in the female part-time/male full-time pay gap since the mid 1970s. The gender gap in hourly earnings for those employed full-time in Britain in 2003 was 18 per cent, while that between women working part-time and men working full-time was 40 per cent. This research uses statistical methods to identify how much of the gender pay gap is associated with different factors. The data set analysed is the British Household Panel Survey, a sample of around 10,000 adults. The data are weighted to be nationally representative.

Broadly, the research finds that gender differences in life-time working patterns account for 36% of the pay gap. Rigidities in the labour market, including those that concentrate women into particular occupations and mean that they are more likely to work in smaller and non-unionised firms, account for a further 18% of the pay gap. 38% is due to direct discrimination and differences in the labour market motivations and preferences of women as compared with men. The remaining 8% is due to women's lesser educational attainment in the past. In many instances, these factors will of course be related to each other. For example, the occupations with higher female participation in which women are concentrated will sometimes also be those where part-time work is particularly prevalent.

The importance of indirect discrimination and systematic disadvantage is noted. They can affect the labour market motivations and preferences of women; they are part of the causes of labour market rigidities; and they are part of the reasons that particular types of working patterns result in lower wages. It is therefore incorrect to make a simplistic assumption that gender wage differences due to variations in education and working patterns are legitimate because they reflect skills, qualifications and experiences that are relevant to employers.

The components of the gender pay gap include factors that have traditionally been associated with either human capital (education, employment experience) or with discrimination (occupational segregation, some of the factors associated with being female). Human capital has been seen as a legitimate source of earnings differences because it is made up of skills, qualifications and experiences that are relevant to employers. Moreover, the attainment of human capital has been seen primarily as an individual attribute. By contrast, discrimination has been seen as a failure in the working of the labour market, and thus a legitimate site of public policy intervention. The argument here is that this dichotomy is overdrawn and can have misleading implications for policy. This is because women face systematic disadvantage in the acquisition of human capital. The acquisition of human capital depends upon the location of women within labour market institutions, as well as on individual decisions.

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