by Across much of the developed world, gender pay disparities all but disappear if comparisons are made like for like, looking at individuals doing the same function in the same company, according to Korn Ferry Hay Group research, which looked at 20 million salaries at 25,000 organizations in 100 nations. However, because of job and career differences women continue on average to earn less than men. Recent data published by Switzerland’s Federal Statistical Office (FSO) show this average pay difference was 16.2% in 2022 in Switzerland, down from 18% in 2020 and 19% in 2018. Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.comThese analyses are far from perfect. The Korn Ferry Hay Group research is based only on those workers in its database. The FSO spreads the net wider to include organisations
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Across much of the developed world, gender pay disparities all but disappear if comparisons are made like for like, looking at individuals doing the same function in the same company, according to Korn Ferry Hay Group research, which looked at 20 million salaries at 25,000 organizations in 100 nations. However, because of job and career differences women continue on average to earn less than men. Recent data published by Switzerland’s Federal Statistical Office (FSO) show this average pay difference was 16.2% in 2022 in Switzerland, down from 18% in 2020 and 19% in 2018.
These analyses are far from perfect. The Korn Ferry Hay Group research is based only on those workers in its database. The FSO spreads the net wider to include organisations employing around 2.3 million people in Switzerland, which is around half the nation’s workforce. However, its analysis isolates and attributes less of the pay gap to differences in job type, sector, role and position, leaving more unexplained.
Overall, the number crunchers at the FSO were only able to associate 48% of the average pay gap to differences in education, position, sector and other factors, leaving 8.4 percentage points of the 16.2% average difference unexplained. Korn Ferry’s data analysis on the other hand manages to reduce it to as low as 2% in Switzerland.
What explains this remaining difference – 8.4% in the FSO data and 2% in the Korn Ferry data – is an open question. Some of it is likely to be due to discrimination but some of it might relate to other unidentified factors that employers rightly of wrongly pay a bit more for.
The 48% that can be explained by the FSO number crunchers could still reflect structural disadvantage. Women are more likely to take time out of the workforce for family and this can affect career progression and position. If more men took time out of the workforce for family and fewer women did then some of this difference would probably disappear as more men missed out on promotion and more women didn’t.
In any case, there appears to be a clear trend towards a smaller gender gap in average salaries. With women continuing to outdo men in educational attainment and increasingly dominate some well professions, such as medical doctors, the downward average wage gap trend is likely to continue. In 2022, 48% of women in Europe aged 25-34 were tertiary educated compared to only 37% of men. And in 2023, most doctors (57%) under the age of 50 working in Switzerland were women. Among doctors under 35 years old, 61% were women.
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