Rozdíly v odměňování žen a mužů v ČR. Pracoviště, zaměstnání, stejná práce a rozklad faktorů / Gender pay gap in CR. Workplaces, occupations, equal work and decomposition of factors.

Summary of main findings
• The position and status of women in the labour market in history has been linked to the social status of
(different groups of) women, the possibility of their access to education and subsequently applying it, and
to the legitimacy of their claim to be economically self-sufficient (independent from men – father, husband,
partner, etc.).
• During the world wars, women‘s work was channelled pragmatically because of the lack of male labour, so
women began to hold positions and professions that had been hitherto reserved for men.
• Although the Communist Regime put emphasis on women‘s empowerment and support of womenʼs participation
in the labour market, gender pay inequality persisted and both childcare and household care
continued to be considered „women‘s work.”
• The rise of capitalism after 1989 increased some of the gender specifics of the labour market, such as segregation,
unequal pay and different conditions for professional growth for women and men.
• The latest foreign and domestic research confirms that the influence of education levels on the gender pay
gap has decreased; therefore, the human capital theory cannot sufficiently explain the gender pay gap.
• Factors such as interrupted careers and segregation of the labour market currently affect the position of
the individual in the labour market more markedly, particularly for women, and consequently the level of
earnings. In some countries, women are still penalized for parenthood (motherhood) in the labour markets,
while fathers usually continue to receive a paternity bonus.
• According to recent research, more considerable pay gaps between women and men are reported between
companies rather than within a particular company. Gender pay gaps between companies and organizations
are the product of the given internal institutional (gender) culture, norms, rules and processes combined
with labour market mechanisms which, just like the processes and mechanisms applied at the institutional
level, are primarily shaped by culture.
• Comparing internationally, the Czech Republic ranks among the countries in which wage variability, or more
precisely wage inequality, significantly increased between 2002 and 2016. These inequalities are higher in
the Czech Republic than in Scandinavia or in France, but they are significantly lower than in Canada or the
USA, for example.
• The labour market in the Czech Republic is becoming increasingly divided into workplaces with high wages
and workplaces with low wages. This applies to both private and public sectors. Women predominate in
low-wage workplaces and men predominate in high-wage workplaces.
• Precarity in the Czech labour market is increasingly a women‘s issue. A “good job” (full-time contract of
indefinite duration, wages higher than two-thirds of the Czech median wage) is becoming harder to secure
among both women (57%) and men (65%).
• In the monitored period, the proportion of women and men whose wages are lower than 50% of the Czech
median wage almost doubled, currently measuring 8% of men and 10% of women. 25% of women and 18%
of men earn less than two-thirds of the Czech median wage, and these proportions have also grown in the
past 15 years.
• 10% of women (a number that has doubled over the past 15 years) and 5% of men work more than halftime
on a part-time arrangement.
• 12% of men and 15% of women worked on a fixed term contract in 2002, rising to 23% of men and 20%
of women in 2016.
• Pay inequalities between women and men in the Czech Republic are very high, even in case of the same
work for the same employer (average 11% difference). The rate of inequality remained almost unchanged
between 2002 and 2016.
• Only about a quarter of the pay gap between men and women can be accounted for by the segregation in
individual employment categories. Similarly, a quarter of the pay gap is caused by the segregation of women
and men into different workplaces.
• The Czech Republic is a country with one of the highest levels of pay inequalities between women and men in
the same working position and at the same workplace. While the gender pay gap on the same working position
is at most 5% in Western European countries, women in the Czech Republic are paid on average 11% less
than men for the same job with the same employer. These numbers are comparable to South Korea or Japan.
• Information about parenthood is not included in ISPV3 data. However, the cohort analysis indicates a significant
penalty for motherhood.
• The widest gender pay gap sorted by education can be found between men and women with university or
high school education, which applies even to the pay gap in case of equal work with the same employer
(10%). The pay gap has increased between university-educated women and men in the past 10 years.
• The comparison of the public and private spheres shows that gender pay gaps are generally lower in the
public sphere, but they are still significant there. Salaries of women and men performing the same work for
the same employer in the public sphere differ on average by 5%, as compared to roughly twice the pay gap
in the private sphere.
• The sectors differ from one another: in the financial and insurance sector and in the construction sector,
the gender pay gap is very wide; women in these sectors receive 17% or 14% less than men working in the
same job. In contrast, women receive 5-6% less than men working in the same job in the education sector
and the administration sector.
• The average gender pay gap between women and men aged 25 to 55 was approximately 26% in 2016.
• Decomposition of the gender pay gap by the Blinder-Oaxaca method has shown that 11 percentage points
of the 26% gender pay gap can be explained by the factors that are available in the data. The remaining
15 percentage points represent the unexplained part (i.e. the effect of factors that are not available in the
data together with the effect of direct or indirect discrimination).
• The differences in individual positions and characteristics of men and women, such as leadership, full-time
jobs, education, age, etc., account for only 0.54 percentage points of the explained part of the gender pay
gap, which itself represents 11 percentage points of the unadjusted gender pay gap in the Czech Republic.
• The segregation of women and men into different jobs contributes 3.53 percentage points to the explained
part of the gender pay gap, which is almost one-third of the explained part of the gender pay gap.
• The largest portion of the explained part of the gender pay gap is caused by company / workplace characteristics
(such as average wages in the workplace and sector) and gender segregation into different companies
/ workplaces. This segregation represents about two-thirds of the explained part of the gender pay
gap, or more precisely, 6.91 percentage point out of 11 p.p.
• The unexplained part of the gender pay gap represents 15 percentage points of the 26% of the unadjusted
gender pay gap. Less than 3 percentage points (2.58 percentage points) can by accounted for by different
rewards for identical individual characteristics of women and men – thus they represent about one-sixth of
the unexplained part.
• Different rewards for men and women depending on the segregation in different jobs, reduces the unexplained
part of the gender pay gap by 5.84 percentage points. Women are better paid in categories in which
they are more represented. If women’s and men’s representation in the labour market were similar, as regards
ISCO and NACE, then women‘s wages would be even lower than under current conditions.
• As in the explained part of gender pay gap, company or workplace characteristics play the most prominent
role in the unexplained part of gender pay gap. Unequal pay for women and men at company and workplace
level contributes to the unexplained part of the gender pay gap by about 67 percentage points (which is
more than the total 15 percentage points).
• The unexplained part of the gender pay gap is reduced by the model constant, which includes the effects
of all the factors unavailable in the data. This constant reduces the unexplained part of the gender pay gap
by 50 percentage points.
• Between 2006 and 2016, the gender pay gap increased by two percentage points, from 24% in 2006 to
26% in 2016. This increase can be attributed to the explained part of the decomposition.
• The sum of individual characteristics between 2006 and 2016 lost its importance for the explained part of
the gender pay gap. The sum of employment characteristics fluctuated, rising slightly overall. On the contrary,
the impact of company / workplace characteristics markedly increased.
• The sum of individual characteristics and employment characteristics fluctuated without a clear trend for
the unexplained part between 2006 and 2016. The sum of company / workplace characteristics grew and
increasingly contributed to the unexplained part.