Nevertheless in 2021, women still earn on average 14.8% less than men in full-time equivalent. Leo Lintang / stock.adobe.com
Despite this improvement, the “effect of occupational segregation” still weighs on women’s wages.
Women earned on average nearly 15% less than men in the private sector in 2021, but the gap is narrowing, according to an INSEE study published Thursday.
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In a context of inflation (+1.6%) in 2021, the statistical institute shows that the average net salary of women in the private sector has decreased by 1%, after a rise of 3.8% in 2020 qualified as “optical illusion“due to the health crisis which took out of the calculations the employees on partial unemployment. At the same time, men’s wages fell by 1.5% after +2.9% in 2020. INSEE notes that the gap between women and men “continues to shrink in 2021», bringing to 6.1 points the reduction since 2008.
It remains that in 2021, “women earn on average 14.8% less than men in full-time equivalent“. The wage gap reflects “an under-representation of women at the top of the wage distribution“, where they represent only 21.9% of the 1% of the highest paid employees, against 41.5% of all employees in the private sector“.
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This gap reflects ‘the effect of occupational segregation and the inequalities that accompany it: the structure of jobs by sector of activity, company size, age, socio-professional category and employment condition is, for example, not the even for women and for men”, explains INSEE. When the positions are comparable (identical profession within the same establishment), the average salary gap between women and men is reduced to 4.3 % in the private sector in 2021, underlines the study.
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