The International Labour Organization (ILO) has just released a paper exploring measures which it says can help expose pay differences between men and women and identify the underlying causes of what is widely believed to be unjustifiable gender discrimination.
On average, while individual characteristics that include education, working time, occupational segregation, skills and experience help explain the pay disparity, the UN agency contends that women are customarily paid around an enormous 20 per cent less than men across the world and that the practice inheres, in large measure, in “discrimination based on gender.” To make matters worse, the ILO says, women’s earnings have been even further affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the area of income security. The ILO study asserts that “disproportionate representation in some hardest-hit sectors and the unequal and gendered division of family responsibilities,” serve to negatively affect women’s employment “threatening to reverse decades of progress made towards gender equality.”
