ILPC 2027

Studies on the Gender Pay Gap (GPG) have often focused on measuring the differences in the individual characteristics of men and women (training, seniority, working time) in order to quantify the explained and unexplained part of such discrepancy, in a way that relegates gender to a sort of “residual” (Baudelot, 1995). Against this type of approach, the paper advocates the pertinence of placing the focus on the sectorial level, analysing the dynamics of the GPG within and across activity sectors. This allows, first of all, taking into account how the undervaluation of women’s work is embedded in patterns of segregation across occupations and activities in the labour market. Secondly, it enables the identification of organizational contexts more or less prone to the GPG. And finally

it allows an analysis of how gendered employment creation and destruction or the degradation of employment conditions within particular sectors may have an impact on the GPG both at the sector and national level. It is on the analysis of the last type of dynamics that we focus in the paper. With this aim, we use data from three cross-sectional editions of the Structure of Earnings Survey (2006-2010-2014), in order to analyse the impact of the crisis and austerity on the GPG by activity sectors and across European countries.