Women employees earn 27% less than men: Monster survey

NEW DELHI: Corporate houses may have rules against gender discrimination, but women employees still don’t get paid as much as their male counterparts. A survey by recruitment firm Monster India says that the median wage earned by women is 27 per cent lower than what men make. On an average, men earn Rs 259.8 per hour whereas their female colleagues earn just Rs 190.5. The online survey had 35,959 respondents across age groups, industries and organisational hierarchies. Nearly 86 per cent of the respondents were males.

Gender continues to play a significant role in determining the wages in the Indian labour market, notes the survey.

It says this gap in earnings could be due to a preference for male employees, promotion of male employees to supervisory positions, career breaks for women due to child birth and other socio-cultural factors. The gender pay gap is not uniform across sectors. In the IT sector, women earn around 34 per cent less, while the difference is only 19 per cent in the finance sector.

The other key factor that defines the pay cheque is the level of education. According to the survey, someone with a professional or postgraduation degree is likely to earn Rs 100 per hour more than an ordinary graduate. Even so, the person with a 3-year bachelor’s degree will earn Rs 80 per hour more than someone with only higher secondary education. “In general, it is beneficial to invest in education in order to obtain higher returns in future, in terms of wages,” says the survey report.

The nature of ownership of your company also decides how much you earn. Foreign owners are the best paymasters, says the survey. Employees of companies wholly owned by foreigners earn Rs 150 more per hour than workers of companies where foreigners have a partial stake. Workers in domestic companies are the worst paid, earning about Rs 115 per hour less than workers in companies where foreigners have a stake and Rs 268 per hour less than wholly foreign-owned companies.

Finally, size of the company also defines the wages earned by employees. The average wage in small firms with 10-50 employees is just above Rs 150 per hour but in giant companies with 5,000 or more employees, it is above Rs 320 per hour.

The survey notes that the IT sector was the best paying sector in the country, with the median wage at Rs 341.8 per hour. This is followed by finance where employees get Rs 291 per hour and construction and technical consultancy where the median wage is Rs 259 per hour. Employees in the education sector get the lowest salary of Rs 186.50 per hour. This could also be due to a higher percentage of women employees in the education sector, the report says.