The latest WED Project insights suggest that the Gender Pay Gap in Great Britain may have been underestimated by approximately one percentage point for the past two decades.
The WED Project’s team of researchers used data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) and applied a revised weighting scheme to address employer-specific response biases. These findings indicate that the UK’s official statistics have likely been underestimating the gender pay gap by about one percentage point over the past two decades, particularly when using the median wage measure. The underestimation occurs because ASHE tends to over-represent larger and public sector employers, where pay is generally higher and gender pay differences within jobs are smaller. Conversely, it under-represents smaller private sector firms, especially for women.
This work has important implications for understanding the true extent of gender pay inequality in Great Britain and potentially for policy measures aimed at addressing it. You can find the slides here.
If you are interested in our research relating to the gender pay gap in Great Britain, check out the discussion paper “Accounting for firms in gender-ethnicity wage gaps throughout the earnings distribution“.
If you have any questions relating to this, or any other WED Project work, leave a comment below. Alternatively, you can email wagedynamics@uwe.ac.uk.