Demographic Factors and their Impact Upon Gender Wage Discrimination in Different Organizational Settings

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of several demographic factors on the salary of individuals and the gender wage differentiation, which prevails across the organizational sectors. The paper is divided into five parts, wherein the first part of the study looks at the previous literature and identifies certain demographic factors that influence the salary of individuals. It also lays down the fundamentals of gender wage discrimination and forms of the hypotheses to be tested. The data had been obtained from the archival database namely Employment in Britain Survey 1991. To understand the determinants of salary, a log linear model has been developed and the dependent variable salary has been regressed against independent variables for estimation. Various instruments have been employed to check the problems of non-linearity, outliers and normality. The Variance Inflation Factors (VIFs) and Tolerance diagnostic tools have been employed to check for high correlation between independent variables. The second and third parts find out the significance of certain demographic factors that affect salary and identify the degree of gender wage discrimination present in private vs. public ones and large vs. small organizations respectively. Rather than using hierarchical regression analysis, separate regression analysis has been employed for each organization in order to better understand the wage differentials. The next part also tries to identify the gender wage differentials after combining the organizational characteristics and the last part identifies the potential pitfalls and limitations of the study. The majority of results indicate that on an individual level, the position in the organization, gender and age have a significant influence on salary distribution, whereas, factors such as education and ethnicity do not have any significant impact.