A new report on pay discrimination released by Oxfam has revealed a stark gender pay gap.
While men earn Rs 19,779 on average, women earn only Rs 15,578, says the report released recently.
The report has attributed 98% of the employment gap between men and women in the salaried class from urban areas to gender discrimination.
Oxfam India’s Discrimination Report 2022 has attempted to capture the discrimination faced by women and other marginalized communities using the decomposition method.
News reports said that data from the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) revealed that women’s labor force participation in India was around 25.1 percent in 2020-21 for both urban and rural women.
Less than two decades ago, the same was 42.1%, making it imperative to intervene.
“There is also a significant gap in the earnings between men and women in the case of regular and self-employment in urban areas. The average earning is Rs 15,996 for men and merely Rs 6,626 for women in urban areas in self-employment. The men’s average earnings are nearly 2.5 times that of the earnings of women,” the report noted.
News reports quoted Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India, as saying that if a man and woman start on an equal footing, the discrimination women face in the economic sphere would result in them lagging in regular or salaried, casual, and self-employment categories. “The inequality in the labor market for gender and other social categories, the report finds is not just due to poor access to education or work experience but because of discrimination,” reports added.
