The gender pay gap isn’t the only issue women face: even women who earn more than men face societal prejudice.
A recent World Bank report on gender disparities in the workplace highlights this inequity: No country in the world gives women the same opportunities as men in the workforce, according to the Women, Business and the Law report, which looked at laws affecting women’s economic opportunities in 190 countries.
For the first time, the 10th edition of the report goes beyond the law book to assess the gap between the law and the policies put in place to implement it: 95 countries have enacted equal pay legislation, but only 35 have taken measures to ensure equal pay.
Even if laws are enacted, their effectiveness will depend on existing social norms in an environment where women are perceived to be less valuable than men. A study by Balotra and colleagues examining the impact of legal reforms in India that gave women equal rights to inherit property found that first-borns were less likely to be girls after the reforms were implemented.
Negative effects of reform
Paradoxically, this reform led to an increase in the foetal homicide of female infants, excess female mortality, and birth control in favor of males.
Long before the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 eradicated female foeticide. But patriarchal norms change only slowly, if at all. And laws alone cannot change a society’s mindset. Unless the overall will of society changes to value daughters as much as sons, laws will remain ineffective.
The World Bank report also found that the global gender gap is much larger than previously thought. Women earn just 77 cents for every dollar men earn, and closing that gap could boost global GDP by more than 20%, the report said. But men are particularly unhappy with their spouses’ economic success. Research from the Australian National University found that women who earn more than their male partners are 33% more likely to report intimate partner violence and 20% more likely to report emotional abuse.
This trend did not hold true when the husband earned more: for men, earning more than half of a couple’s income means they conform to the male breadwinner norm, the study noted.
In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, economists Marianne Bertrand, Emile Kamenica and Jessica Pan wrote that in couples where the wife’s potential earnings are more likely to exceed her husband’s, the wife is less likely to join the labor force.
The authors also found that when wives earn more than their husbands, they spend more time on housework, and such couples are less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce. These studies show that gender discrimination is widespread, despite the existence of laws, policies, and regulations to prevent it.
We may not realize that we contribute to these problems in our daily lives. Therefore, it is our personal responsibility to solve these problems. This requires introspection. Ask the women around you what you can do to improve their lives.
Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan once said, “Old habits die hard, but these are certainly worth eradicating.”
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Issued on March 11, 2024
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