Gender pay gap: Women in healthcare earn 24% less than men, says WHO, ILO report

The most comprehensive global analysis of gender pay inequalities in the healthcare sector finds that women face a larger gender pay gap than other economic sectors.

Women in the health and wellness sector face a larger gender pay gap than in other economic sectors, earning on average of 24% less than peers who are men, according to a new joint report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The report, which is the world’s most comprehensive analysis on gender pay inequities in health, finds a raw gender pay gap of approximately 20 percentage points, which jumps to 24 percentage points when accounting for factors such as age, education and working time. This highlights that women are underpaid for their labour market attributes when compared to men.

Much of the wage gap is unexplained, perhaps due to discrimination towards women - who account for 67 percent of health and care workers worldwide. The report also finds that wages in the health and care sector tend to be lower overall, when compared with other economic sectors.

This is consistent with the finding that wages are often lower in economic sectors where women are predominant.

The gender pay gap in the health and care sector: a global analysis in the time of Covid-19 finds that, even with the Covid-19 pandemic and the crucial role played by health and care workers, there were only marginal improvements in pay equality between 2019 and 2020.

It also finds a wide variation in gender pay gaps in different countries, suggesting that pay gaps in the sector are not inevitable and that more can be done to close these gaps. Within countries, gender pay gaps tend to be wider in higher pay categories, where men are over-represented. Women are over-represented in the lower pay categories.

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