Why is there still a gender pay gap in Britain? What are its components? There have been major changes in gender relations and the structuring of the labour market, including decades of anti-discrimination legislation, the closing of the gender education qualifications gap among young people, and increased paid statutory maternity leave. Our research utilises the capacity of the British Household Panel Survey to differentiate between the different types of employment experienced by women over a life-time. We include institutional and structural labour market factors. Educational levels, today, differentiate between women and men in the UK only a little. Part-time work is better understood as a site of cumulative disadvantage in the acquisition of training and human capital, rather than as a current location of additional discrimination. Not only is full-time employment experience a key source of wage advantage; even short interruptions to employment for family care have a substantial additional negative impact on wages. (It is well established already that ‘unemployment’ per se has a similar negative effect. Gender-aware analysis reveals that the term ‘unemployment’ is perhaps too restrictive since it doesn’t cover the apparent ‘scarring’ effect of non-employment.)

Finally, we argue for the use of an ontology of gender that has more depth than those previously used in the quantitative analysis of the gender wage gap.

We measure and decompose the gender wage gap using our innovative simulation method.

Further research is planned on the labour-force participation issue; on part-time work strategies of persons & households; on multi-level analysis of these data; and on time-series analysis of the work-histories’ effects on wages.

We are presently modelling by simulation the forward effects of reducing the UKs gender wage gap.

Glossary: Ontology= a theory of the objects that exist in society.