Data from the first quarter of the 2022 Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) indicates that among paid workers, women earned 34.2 percent less than men. The estimated gender wage gap adjusts for age, approximate years of work experience, highest level of education attended, main occupation, industry, employment sector, and region of residence.
The gender wage gap is lowest among paid workers with tertiary education or more where women earn 12.7 percent less than their male counterparts. The wage gap is highest among workers with basic education (60.1%) followed by workers with no education (54.0%).
When comparing sectors of employment, the gender wage gap is highest in the private informal sector where women are paid 58.7 percent less than men. This is followed by the private formal sector with a wage gap of 29.9 percent. The public sector, where women are paid 10.5 percent less than men has the lowest gender wage gap.
Among the population aged 36 to 60 years, women are paid 33.4 percent less than men, a wage differential almost 3.0 percentage points higher than for the age group 15 to 35 years where women were paid 30.7 percent less than their male counterparts.
Labour market regulations may have an impact on gender wage inequality in Ghana. The findings that the wage gaps are smaller in formal employment and for people with tertiary education are consistent with the following explanation. If employers believe that maternity and childcare may affect women’s productivity, then statistical discrimination induces employers to pay women lower wages because they expect high average female labour costs.
However, labour market regulations and affirmative action policies that protect women can easily be monitored in the formal sectors. Therefore, formal wage employment protects women and thus minimizes discrimination against women in the workplace. This finding is consistent with studies in other African countries where wage employment is very small compared with self-employment. We also find that the gender wage gap reduces when the level of education increases, a result that has commonly been seen in the literature on the gender wage gap in SSA. This finding is often explained by statistical discrimination in low-wage jobs, where labour regulations are often absent.
We therefore argue that the formalization of businesses and implementation of affirmative policies that target female participation in secondary and tertiary levels of education may reduce the gender wage gap
Globally there is a US$172 trillion difference between men and women’s total expected lifetime earnings
Over the course of their lifetimes, there is an earning difference of US$172 trillion between men and women. And here’s why — an employed woman will still only make 77% of a man’s wages. And that gap can change depending on a woman’s race, education, and more.
Every additional year a girl is in school can boost her future earnings by up to 20%
A lot of the current gender pay gap goes right back to education. There has been some progress in girls’ education, but more is needed if we want to close the gender pay gap.
The gender wage gap is highest in the private informal sector (58.7%), more than five times the gap in the public sector, where women are paid 10.5% percent less than men
