Women in the health and care sector face a larger gender pay gap than in other economic sectors, earning on average of 24 percent less than peers who are men, according to a new joint report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The report, the world’s most comprehensive analysis on gender pay inequities in health, finds a raw gender pay gap of approximately 20 percentage points which jumps to 24 percentage points when accounting for factors such as age, education and working time. This highlights that women are un-derpaid for their labour market attributes when compared to men.
Much of the wage gap is unexplained, perhaps due to discrimination towards women – who account for 67 percent of health and care workers worldwide. The report also finds that that wages in the health and care sector tend to be lower overall, when compared with other economic sectors. This is consistent with the finding that wages often are lower in economic sectors where women are predominant.
The gender pay gap in the health and care sector: a global analysis in the time of COVID-19 finds that, even with the COVID-19 pandemic and the crucial role played by health and care workers, there were only marginal improvements in pay equality between 2019 and 2020.—AP
