Looking beyond the Gender Pay Gap: Research Results on the (De)Valuation of Women and Men’s Work

Abstract

The gender pay gap is a relevant, widespread phenomenon, with deep historical roots: the low paid female labour force played a determinant role in the capitalistic economies since the earlier development of the European textile industry. Despite several legal and policy’s measures, undertaken during the last decades in many different national and international contexts, the problem persists in all European and Western countries. The issue has been extensively documented and analyzed in different sociological and economic contributions, focused almost exclusively on the construction of measurement tools, on the basis of different econometric methods. However, studies that attempt to highlight the deep cultural roots of the issue remain rare and isolated, although they have been deemed as crucial in many contributions, both institutional, and academic. For such a reason, in this contribution we try to shift the analytical focus on the several and interrelated elements, which constitute the cultural basis of the gender pay inequalities. To this end, we will present the results of a qualitative research we conducted in the province of Bolzano (an area of north-east Italy) during 2009. More precisely, our reflection is based on an analysis of 30 semi-structured key informant interviews, with subjects who occupy strategic roles in the local labour market and vocational training. The use of a qualitative approach in analyzing data from interviewees with specialized competences on the local employment development, allows to focus rather than on the gender pay gap per se, understood as an economic “tip of the iceberg”, on the broader range of inequalities between women and men culturally and socially constructed and on the different (de)valuation of women and men's work instead.