Global Inequalities by Robert J. Holton

Author:Robert J. Holton [Holton, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Political Science, Globalization, Sociology
ISBN: 9781137339584
Google: vbqjBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
Published: 2014-11-20T04:19:24+00:00

The are also two areas where indicators suggest women’s advantage over men. These are in life expectancy and educational attainment at secondary and tertiary levels.

Most, but not all of these indicators can be quantified. Measurement of vulnerability to violence and domestic subordination is extremely difficult even where public legislation exists banning certain violent practices, such as trafficking of women, or abortion of female foetuses. Indirect measures may nonetheless be instructive, whether legislation exists or not, as in the skewed distribution of male and female infants in countries where female foetuses are aborted (Guilmoto 2012). This practice – known as gendercide – is evident not merely in India and China, but also according to the UN Population Fund (ibid. 20), in the Balkans. Within these limits I now look at individual items in these lists, and possible interconnections between them.

Beginning with economic inequality, there are a number of salient features of gender inequality. The first is income inequality for economically active women. This is reflected in a gap in income levels between men and women in general, and also when differing acquired skills are taken into account. We do not have systematic data on male and female ‘income’ for the world as a whole, and analysis therefore rests on countries for which evidence is available, most of which are developed. For the EU and the United States in 2006, this gap ranged from 7–22%, lowest in Denmark and Finland and highest in Ireland and the United States (European Commission 2008). The World Bank also produces data on the gender gap in manufacturing across the world. In 2009 this stood at 23%, varying regionally between 9% in East Asia and the Pacific, to 47% in the Middle East and North Africa (World Bank 2011b). The most recent data from the International Labour Organization (ILO 2013) compare the gender pay gap between 1999–2007 and 2008–2011 to include the effect of the Global Financial Crisis. These data indicate a continued lessening of the pay gap even through the GFC.

The global pay gap figures also have a further technical problem built into them, which may mislead observers into under-estimating inequality. The difficulty is that smaller pay gaps do not necessarily mean women’s absolute position has improved. There are at least two cases where this would apply. The first is where smaller pay gaps arise from a decline in male wages where women’s wages stay the same. The ILO data shows this happened during the GFC which hit male employment harder in countries like Estonia (ibid. 4–5). Since the gender pay gap is very low for part-time work any worsening of men’s conditions of employment is likely to narrow the gap with women, without making women better off. The second, discussed by Walby (2009) is where smaller pay gaps arise in countries with low historic female participation in paid employment, for example, in certain southern European countries. Here, women are not found in some sectors of lower paid work and hence it is only somewhat higher paid women whose incomes are being compared with men.

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