Beyond the Average Gender Pay Gap: Three New Analyses of Women’s Labour Market Outcomes

Despite repeated commitments to promote gender equality in the United Na- tions and elsewhere, women are still not as favoured as men in many dimensions, including the labour market. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the changing female relative labour market outcomes. This thesis is made up of three empirical studies. The first empirical study describes and analyses the impact on the inter- national gender wage differentials, measured at the mean, of globalisation and the development of social openness, and how such impact has been changing over time across different income and development levels and across different cultural back- grounds. The objective of the second empirical study is to understand the variation in the gender differential in employment in Japan, and investigate the relationship between such variation and the development of technology. The third empirical study determines the evolution of the UK gender gap at the top end of the wage distribution in relation to different labour market sectors, occupations, and different cohort groups, both within cohorts over their work lives, and across cohorts.
The results indicate that the effect on gender wage differentials of the develop- ment of the economy and technology vary across different regions and skill levels of workers. Having higher human capital accumulation or working in higher level jobs is not always positively associated with good female labour market outcomes. More stringent policy enforcement benefits the majority of women in terms of wages, but such effects are found to be relatively weak for the women at the top decile of the female wage distribution and more recent generations. Societal constraints do not only limit female progress in the labour market but also the positive impact of female politicians.