Eloïse Stark
Midterm Essay
How to explain that women still get lower wages than men in the OECD countries?

In western countries since the Second World War, women’s growing participation on the labor market has been one of the most profound transformations not only of the economy but also of society as a whole. Dual income families have become the norm and in a bid for sexual equality, most OECD countries have created laws to protect pay equality for men and women, such as the Equal Pay Act in 1963 in the US, or the article 119 of the EEC treaty. Nonetheless, women continue to earn less than men in all OECD countries.
There are different ways of measuring this. Comparing annual or monthly earnings shows the difference between what both sexes “take home”, which is interesting from a sociological perspective. However we shall focus on the “gender pay gap”, defined as the “the relative difference in the average gross hourly earnings of women and men working full time”. This shows the difference between the actual “price” of women and men’s labor, taking into consideration the fact that men work more hours on average. How does the gender gap stand today?
 Despite differences between countries the gender pay gap remains a persistent characteristic of OECD labor markets. In 2006, women earned an average of 16% less than men, per hour worked.

 … Although we can see a slow but continuous drop over the past few decades in all countries In OECD countries, which are mainly liberal democracies that prone equality and economic efficiency, the difference in wages shouldn’t, theoretically, be directly linked to sex, but to productivity. With the convergence between the sexes, the difference in productivity should be disappearing, and yet the gender wage gap, whilst slowly declining, remains a reality. It is important to address the issue of the gender pay gap,