Gender Inequality at Work
Gender inequality is a major issue that has a significant impact on the evolution of human society. Kolb (2008) said "gender inequality can be defined as allowing people different opportunities due to perceived differences based solely on issues of gender". Scholars Heitner and Allisonity define gender inequality as a "legal, cultural, or social situation where gender determines disparate opportunities and rights for women and men" (2022). Academic study on such a significant societal issue is likewise complex and diverse. Studies on education, work, trade, health, science, and other topics are more representative (Jacobs 1996, Cotter, Hermsen & Vanneman 2004, Busse & Spielmann 2006, van Wijk 1996, Penner 2015). Sen (2001) outlined seven distinct aspects of gender inequity. Simultaneously, he stated in the conclusion of the essay that the most effective approaches to reduce inequality are to improve women's education and gainful employment.
When we get into a specific area of workplace gender inequality, it's obvious that we need to recognize that it's a historical issue. According to Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman (2004)'s data analysis on work-related gender inequality in the final half of the twentieth century, gender inequality existed throughout the century but improved in the 1990s. As Reskin (2000) said, "One of sociology’s major accomplishments in the last quarter of the twentieth century was establishing that race and gender matter at work." Scholars began to focus on the manifestation of various parts of this problem in the twenty-first century.
In the more than fifty years since the first equal pay legislation was implemented, the pay gap has consistently been a key aspect of gender inequality in the labour market. According to O'Reilly et al. (2015), The overall pay gap in many developed countries, including the UK, has tended to narrow over the past years, but has not closed.More specifically, evidence from the report Gender pay gap in the UK: 2021 indicates that gender pay gap in the UK has been gradually declining from 20.2% to 15.4% in general over the last decade (2011-2021), falling about a quarter, but remains significant (ONS, 2021).
Leadership is another critical issue for gender inequality. In recent years, although the gender gap in leadership in the UK has continued to narrow, there are still fewer women leaders than men in top companies, means that gender equality in economic decision-making still exists. (Ford et al., 2020). In this context, a number of studies have examined gender diversity and governance of corporate boards at the individual and company levels. In the report Gender Equality Index 2020: United Kingdom, one finding is that shares of women on the boards of the largest publicly listed companies have steadily increased from 14% in 2010 to 35% in 2020, but still significantly below 50% (EIGE, 2020). Singh and Vinnicombe's (2004) study of female directors in the FTSE 100 companies in 2002 revealed that female directors tend to be in a small, unrepresentative number of positions.
It is also worth noting that the epidemic has made these problems more visible. According to Amanda Taub (2020) from the New York Times, the covid-19 outbreak set the effort of closing the gender gap back by more than a decade.
Firstly, many scholars have looked at gender inequalities in unpaid work as a result of the lockdown. During the lockdown in the UK, women spent much more time on unpaid care work than men (Xue and McMunn, 2021; Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque, 2021). Besides, Zamberlan et al (2021) studied the impact of how couples distributed housework during the first covid-19 lockdown in the UK, and the empirical results show that unpaid work, particularly housework, remained a female responsibility, and that this gender inequality was more pronounced in female breadwinner household.
Women's work at home also has been affected because of childcare and domestic responsibilities. The IFS study found that mothers found it more difficult to work effectively at home during the pandemic (Andrew et al, 2020). Besides, there is evidence that covid-19 has exacerbated gender inequalities in the academic world (Alam et al, 2021). Vincent-Lamarre et al (2020) examined changes in the workplace of female researchers during the lockdown and concluded that when female academics are confined to their homes, they are more likely to face increased family responsibilities, which can lead to reduced academic production.
In terms of unemployment, women are more likely than men to be unemployed and have lower incomes, and women are also more concerned about the future impact of covid-19 on their labour income (Dang and Nguyen, 2021; Hupkau and Petrongolo, 2020). Besides, women, especially mothers, experience a greater decline in happiness and a greater risk of mental distress (Zhou et al, 2020; Xue and McMunn, 2021).
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