WOMEN’S MONTH
TIM COHEN: Causes and solutions leave a maze of trails for gender pay gap
Recently, Business Day editor Lukanyo Mnyanda asked me to investigate the gender pay gap in SA, and as a result I spent a difficult week trying to get some kind of factual breakdown of what the situation actually is. The numbers were hard to come by, and even more difficult to assess, but the story duly appeared in July. This being Women’s Month, I thought I might reflect a little on the results here. I have to say it was an education doing the story, not because it revealed the level of discrimination — I think that is pretty much a given — but because the reasons for it and available remedies are so complicated. The first point to make is that the data suggests a difference of about 15% in most countries in the world, including SA, between like-for-like work, calculated on an hourly basis. The second point to make is that this difference is coming down, and in many European countries the gap is now quite small. Is a 15% gap high or low? Frankly, I expected it to be higher. The gap...
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