Women in the world PID: The Gender Pay Gap in Serbia

If you are a woman in the labour market, pay attention to not fall down in a gap or to not hit your head against a glass ceiling!

Before talking about gender pay gap and glass ceiling it may be useful to give some definitions.

Gender pay gap is defined by the European Commission as: "the difference between men’s and women’s pay, based on the average difference in gross hourly earnings of all employees."

As far as Glass ceiling is concerned, Ann Morrison describes the problem: the glass ceiling is a barrier "so subtle that it is transparent, yet so strong that it prevents women from moving up the corporate hierarchy", women can see the high-level corporate positions but are kept from "reaching the top" (Breaking the Glass Ceiling, 1994). The glass ceiling is invisible but real, barriers that prevent women from reaching high level working positions and they are due to different factors, but the most important are prejudice and discrimination.

Some EU institutions, like EIGE, has done research and studies about these problems by monitoring the situation among different EU member States.

But for what concerns countries which are not part of EU, like Serbia, informations are very poor or even lacking. But it seems that things are going to change. As a matter of fact, on the 20th of October 2014, EIGE published this title: "Serbia will be the first country outside the EU to build a gender equality index based on the Gender Equality Index of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). EIGE experts investigated the possibilities during an official visit on 14 and 15 October and concluded that it is relevant and technically feasible to construct such an Index in Serbia: Serbia has the appropriate statistical know-how and expertise to do so."

Until we wait for the Gender Equality Index, there is a recent study: "Gender Pay Gap in the Western Balkan Countries: Evidence from Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia" (2013), that is useful to analyse in order to understand gender pay gap in Serbia. According to new research conducted by a team of two think-tanks, The Belgrade-based Foundation for the Advancement of Economics (FREN) and the Skoplje-based University American College Skopje (UACS): in Serbia, women employees have higher qualifications than men, but yet they still earn less.

For a better understanding of the statistical results produced, we need to distinguish between "raw/unadjusted gender wage gap" and "true/adjusted wage gap". The first one is a simple difference in the average female vs. male wage. The second one is calculated using econometric methods that make it possible to compare women with men, holding the same work characteristics - such as education level or years of work experience – in addition to the comparison of women and men within the same occupation or sector of activity. In Serbia, the unadjusted gap is 3.3%, while the adjusted gap is 11%. Practically, this difference means that, when the labour market characteristics are taken into consideration, the pay gap raises. So the adjusted gap shows that in Serbia women and a men doing the same work, despite they have same work characteristics, men are still paid more than women. This result clearly underlines that the wage gap has nothing to do with professional skills but it is strictly related to gender discrimination based on some prejudice: men are more authoritative, women are less flexible with working hours due to their family responsibilities, etc.

Due to the particular structure of the Serbian labour market, it is important to analyse the gender wage gap separately in public and private sector.

As it is shown in the graphic below, the wage gap in Serbia is bigger in the private sector as a result of the glass ceiling. In the public sector the wage gap is the same in law paid and high paid work positions, while in private sector the wage gap for low paid profiles is 5.5% and it is 14% for the high paid positions.