More than three-quarters of the reduction in the gender pay gaps over the past 25 years is due to the increase in women’s educational attainment, a report has said.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) also found raising the minimum wage has helped close the gender pay gaps for lower earners.
But there has been no similar progress for graduates for whom the gap in hourly wages has not shifted at all.
This means “barely any change” to the gender earnings gap, the IFS said.
The government said the national gender pay gaps have “fallen significantly” and 1.9 million more women were in work compared to 2010.
The research, part of the (IFS) Deaton Review of Inequalities, measured gender earnings gaps across three different margins; employment, hours and wage rates.
The authors found that working-age women do more than 50 hours a month more unpaid work than men and that gender gaps in employment and hours increase substantially immediately upon parenthood.
The researchers suggest that the reason for any progress in closing gender earnings gaps is only because of the increases in women’s education levels.
The average working-age woman in the UK earned 40% less than her male counterpart in 2019 which is 25% lower than in the mid-1990s, but working-age women are now more educated on average than working-age men.
In the past 25 years, women of working age in the UK have gone from being five percentage points less likely to five percentage points more likely to have a university degree than men.
The gender earnings pay gap falls, therefore, look “particularly modest” once the rising education of women is accounted for, explained Alison Andrew, a senior research economist at the IFS and author of the report.
