Egalitarian Workplaces: The Organizational Ecology of Gender Wage Inequality in 13 High-Income Countries

• In Event: Measurements and Methods for Understanding Dynamics in Occupations, Work, and Organizations

Abstract

Scholars have produced extensive knowledge about mechanisms that generate inequality, but far less attention has been paid to where inequality is declining and how rapidly progress is occurring. This paper addresses that gap by examining the ecology of workplaces: how many workplaces can be considered gender egalitarian—paying women and men equally—and where workplaces have become more egalitarian over the past three decades. Using linked employer-employee administrative data from 13 high-income countries between 1994 and 2023, we measure workplace-level gender wage gaps and track their evolution. We find that the share of egalitarian workplaces varies widely across countries, yet such workplaces exhibit strikingly similar characteristics. They are resource-poor, paying lower wages to both women and men and offering fewer job opportunities. More broadly, we observe a general trend of progress across workplaces, with the largest gains occurring in highly male-advantaged workplaces where men historically earned far more than women. By contrast, progress within egalitarian workplaces has been much slower, stalled, or even reversed, suggesting that the stalled gender revolution is primarily a phenomenon of egalitarian workplaces with limited resources. These findings point to the need to better understand divergent organizational pathways for equality and design policies to sustain progress across workplaces.

Authors

• Eunmi Mun, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• István Boza, Institute of Economics of the ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (KRTK)

• Jiwook Jung, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Andrew Penner, University of California-Irvine

• Miloslav Bahna, Slovak Academy of Sciences

• Susanne Edler, Université de Fribourg

• Marta M. Elvira, IESE Business School

• Olivier Godechot, CNRS

• Martin Haellsten, Stockholm University

• Lasse Folke Henriksen, Copenhagen Business School

• Are Skeie Hermansen, University of Oslo

• Virág Ilyés, CERS

• Young-Mi Kim, Yonsei University

• Alena Křížková, Czech Academy of Sciences

• Naomi Kodama, Meiji Gakuin University

• Zoltán Lippényi, University of Groningen

• Kathrin Morosow, University of Manchester

• Malte Reichelt, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

• Halil Sabanci, IESE Business School