Our analysis focused on two British birth cohorts available from the UK Data Service, one born in 1958 (tracked up to age 55), and one born in 1970 (tracked up to age 42). We supplemented this analysis by an examination of historic data covering the last 100 years and a review of existing studies.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented, history tends to repeat itself. Therefore, in order to fully understand how the gender pay gap will evolve, we first needed to evaluate what happened to the gender pay equality in the past, and how effective the past policy interventions were.
We took 1921 as our starting point, which is japan rcs data when the earliest statistics, for full-time manual workers are available. At this time women earned about a half (50%) on men’s hourly pay. Since then, the gap closed by 10 percentage points during World War Two and by another 10 percentage points in the 1970s, when the Equal Pay Act was introduced. However, since the 1970s the convergence has slowed. The recent statistics estimate the average gender pay gap in the UK at a little below 20%.
These changes to pay were accompanied by changes in other aspects of life. Women were gradually catching up with men in terms of education, until 1990s, when women eventually started to outperform men in tertiary education. During the same period, with an exception of a couple of peaks after World War Two, the number of births fell, and women’s labour market participation rates increased. Today, although more likely to work part-time, women account for nearly half of the workforce.