Page 84 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

Zahra Huseynova: The Correlation Between Gender Pay GAP AND GDP Growth In Azerbaijan Economy

Because of those movements today women became one of the major part worlds of
business, politics, science, art and other fields, they have reached high levels in career
levels so, we can see female CEO’s, entrepreneurs, scientists, politicians and so on.
However, despite all these revolutions, unfortunately, there still exists a degree of
gender inequality in the labor market and a considerable wage gap across the world.
The gender wage gap is described as phenomenon such that women with same
capacity, productivity with male workers are paid or promoted less because of their
gender. The reason for such discrimination is various: there is hard stereotypes
developed in different cultures that women are incapable to work in some areas
because of being weak or emotional; there is also some personal bias by employers
against female workers; and sometimes, employers this phenomenon to cost saving
purposes. Thus, recent data figures show that there are huge gaps between earnings of
male and female employees across the different sectors. The Global Gender Pay Gap
Report (2021) calculates that there needs 135.6 years to close the wage gap between
genders.

The degree of gender discrimination in labor force can be various in different
countries, sectors, and position; this can be in the process of job offering, promotion
or even project-duty handling. Additionally, the gender discrimination can be going
into deeper whereas women face some materialism, objectivism, and verbal
sometimes physical harassments. Another problem is that due to low earnings, women
are able to consume, save and invest less, which led to either poverty of alone women
or the dependent of them from other people.

According to Pignatti (2016), in the Soviet Union women participation rate in labor
force was high and they were earning almost same as men as among the middle class.
The main reasons for this phenomenon were a few: firstly, the rebellions of female
workers during Russian Revolution, secondly government planned to encourage
workers and thirdly to create so called perfect country ideology. However, after the
collapse of the USSR the socialism philosophy altered by capitalism in all new
countries where the gender balance in labor market also changed. In this regard, as a
post-soviet country, we investigated Azerbaijan labor market to see how the gender
equilibrium has become. Unfortunately, the data analysis is not quite optimistic.
Recently, The Global Gender Pay Gap report (2021) ranked the countries based on
th
The Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) and unfortunately Azerbaijan is 100 out of
156 countries. The statistics also show that while women generate half of the labor
force in Azerbaijan, they only earn 48% of men’s income. In addition, the report of
State Committee on Women’s Problems of the Republic of Azerbaijan (2005) claims
that employers who want to decrease staff expenses divide candidates into two parts
and offer different level of wages for men and women employees.

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