Executive women earn 30% less than executive men - There is no plausible explanation for it

The rate of academics among women in management positions is higher than the corresponding figure for male managers. The same is true of seniority at work and experience. Managers also declare a higher level of commitment to the workplace from managers, and higher prices they pay on the family front - according to regular surveys conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Even when the number of weekly working hours is taken into account, managers earn about 30% more than managers on a monthly basis.
A new study, based on data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, shows that after neutralizing all accepted claims for explaining gender pay gaps - from years of education, through age and marital status to the industry - it is still not possible to explain about 70% of the pay gap between managers. This "unexplained" part is commonly attributed to discrimination against women.
"Discrimination in the labor market is arbitrary and persistent, and especially strong at the management levels," says researcher Yafit Alfandri. "Women feel the glass ceiling well." Alfandari is a senior executive at the Central Bureau of Statistics, which is also responsible for concentrating on gender statistics. Gender pay gaps are not a new issue, but claims that they have lost their importance in the 21st century have pushed it to examine the situation in the senior ranks of the labor market.
Equally outrageous about these claims, she adds, are deniers who argue that the differences disappear when comparing all the different characteristics or those that say they are "legitimate" differences at all, reflecting personal preferences of men and women. The sky's the limit. seemingly. "At any economic conference one can hear an explanation that women choose, of their own free will of course, to work less, concentrate on non-prestigious professions and be more at home. The fact that even among men and women with the same characteristics there are large gaps proves that there is gender discrimination."
In the new study, Alfandari relied on data from the Household Expenditure Survey, the Labor Force Survey and the Social Survey, conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics for the past 20 years. Thus, it turns out that the gaps between managers are around 30% in the calculation of the monthly salary and about 18% in the calculation per hour. The difference in the number of working hours per week is not significant: 48.7 among men compared to 44.1 among women. According to the 2016 Social Survey, principals reported higher organizational involvement than managers - and that their functioning in family life was impaired as a result of work, compared to men of a similar rank.
Alexandra Kelev, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University
Common economic theories attribute the reasons for the gender pay gap to personal preferences of both sexes (e.g .: women's preference to concentrate on the family), or emphasize the choice of field of study and occupation or other, more structural features of the labor market. In theory, there should have been no gaps between men and women who studied it for several years, gained it seniority at work, worked it for several hours and are in the same occupation. In practice, the reality is different.
To prove this, Alfandari oversaw a range of variables, including age, years of schooling and academic degree, marital status, industry and more. For non-managerial employees, these explained about 50% of the wage gaps found in both sexes, similar to previous studies, in Israel and around the world. Among executives, however, the share of the "unexplained" component rose to about 70%. It is a kind of black hole, to which the conventional claims do not apply. In the research literature, it is considered an expression of discrimination: elusive, sometimes fluid - but very tangible.
Alfandry published the study as part of the CBS '"Position Papers" series: research papers that rely on the organization's data but are not its official publications. It may also have allowed for a more liberating formulation. She wrote, "Women make up about half of the labor market, are more educated and enterprising, and the legislation on equal rights and opportunities is very advanced. And yet, women still suffer from pay discrimination - especially in senior positions. "Women are much less rewarded - even though their efforts are much greater than those of men."
According to Prof. Alexandra Kelev of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, the importance of Alfandari's research lies, among other things, in highlighting the gender pay gap by the hour. "One of the complaints of the average man is that women work less. But then it turns out that the difference is not big - and they also earn less per hour," she says. "The higher the education and rank in the organization, the closer the 'glass ceiling' is for women, while men's wages continue to rise. For men, the return on education and promotion is higher than for women, and includes not only wages but a host of additional benefits Including, the gaps are much larger. "
Prof. Caleb also says that once they have managed to climb the ranks of the organization, women are usually coerced into staff jobs - such as human resources, welfare or public relations and external relations - which "are less rewarding and less likely to progress. Because social networks tend to be homogeneous, women executives have "Less social connections in working with people who can promote them, and accordingly also receive at least informal training, mentoring, recommendations and other informal resources important for promotion. Women also experience more sexual harassment, which not only impairs productivity but also marks very clear boundaries for them."
"Gender discrimination is stronger at the management level and stems from gender stereotypes," Alfandri tells Haaretz. In 2015, she attended a lecture by an American feminist at Tel Aviv University, Paula England. The lecture opened with a presentation of gender pay gaps over the past 50 years in the US. "The graph showed a slow reduction, until it stopped at around 30%," she recalls. . That did not happen: even in the second decade of the 21st century, the wage gap between women and men is still high and sharp. "