March 24, 2020

In this months’ Straits Times’ “Ask NUS” column, Dr Kelvin Seah Kah Cheng’s (NUS Economics) article on “How can we tell if women are discriminated against in the labour market?” examines the methods in which the gender pay gap can be credibly measured. He points out that while Singapore’s median monthly salary of full-time female workers was found to be 16.3 per cent less than that of their male counterparts, the data alone does not provide conclusive evidence of gender discrimination. Other considerations like age, education, hours worked, occupation and industry, alongside other unobservable skills like creativity, teamwork, and motivation must also be accounted for.

Dr Seah explains that a credible experiment that measures gender discrimination should involve test groups of men and women who are identical in all ways. For instance, one popular method uses two identical fictitious resumes, which differ only in the applicant’s stated gender and name. The resumes are then randomly sent to employers and the interview call-back rate is compared. These studies have found that gender discrimination often depends on the nature of the profession, with women receiving more call backs from occupations in the food and beverage, data entry, customer service, and sales industries, but less in high-skilled administrative jobs within the financial industry.

Nevertheless, Dr Seah points out that hiring discrimination was found mostly towards younger women, with a possible reason being the likelihood of career interruptions due to childbearing. Other factors might also be affecting the earnings and career progression of women. For instance, Dr Seah raises attention to a study conducted at a United States public university which demonstrated how students rated an instructor significantly lower when they perceived the instructor to be female. The article thus concludes that while wage data alone cannot paint a complete picture of discrimination, the wage data and various experiments conducted thus far do indeed surface evidence of labour discrimination against women.

Read the article here.