Abstract
Northern Ireland forms an important outlier to the established international pattern of a pronounced gender pay gap in favour of men. Using contemporary data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey we provide a comprehensive analysis of the gender pay gap in Northern Ireland and make comparisons to the rest of the UK. Despite the relatively common institutional and policy context, the gender pay gap in Northern Ireland is found to be far smaller than in the rest of the UK. This can largely be attributed to the superior productivity-related characteristics of women relative to men in Northern Ireland, which partially offset the influence of gender differences in the returns to these characteristics. Our analysis highlights the importance of occupation – both in terms of occupational allocation and the returns to occupations – in explaining the cross-country differential. This is reinforced by the impact of lower earnings inequality in Northern Ireland.
Highlights
The well-developed international literature on the gender pay gap, whilst exhibiting variation across time and countries, documents a persistent, and typically sizeable, GPG
By exploring stark cross-country variation within the relatively common institutional, economic and policy context of the UK, this analysis provides a novel contribution to the international literature that is not plagued by the complexity and unobserved heterogeneity typically affecting cross-country comparisons, or issues relating to consistency of data collection
Suggests a higher rate of union membership in NI, something we explore in sensitivity analysis since information on union membership is only available in selected quarters of the QLFS. 10 For example, NI did not adopt the 2010 Equality Act or 2017 GPG Reporting Regulations as per the RUK, but instead retains separate equality legislation for different protected characteristics, including the Equal Pay Act (NI) (1970) and the Sex Discrimination (NI) Order (1976)
Summary
Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world’s largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author
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