Study title

The UK's median gender pay gap has substantially reduced from 36.4% in the 1970s to around 18%, yet it remains one of the highest in the EU and OECD. Previously attributed to differences in education and work experience, this explanation is outdated as women now frequently outpace men in education and are less likely to leave the workforce. However, women still earn about 10% less than men, even with similar work and qualifications. Research has shifted focus from productivity differences to the potential role of employer wage-setting practices. This research suggests that women's negotiating power may be undermined by familial responsibilities, leading to lower mobility in the job market and consequently lower wages. The study will explore how employer wage-setting power and job-to-job mobility contribute to the gender pay gap, aiming to inform effective policies. The collection contains a set of syntax files used to construct an alternative employment concentration index that takes into account commuting costs. The files are based on the Stata language and use the Business Structure Dataset and the UK Longitudinal Household Study to derive the index.The median gender pay gap has declined dramatically in the UK from 36.4% in the 1970 (O'Reilly, Smith et al. 2015) to around 18% in the most recent data (ONS 2018). Still, by international standards the pay gap is high: the UK has the fourth largest gender pay gap in the EU and the eighth largest of OECD countries (OECD 2019). Researchers and policy makers have focused on gender differences in education and labour market experience as the likely drivers of the pay gap. However, today these explanations no longer stand up to scrutiny. Women are on average better educated than men and they are much less likely to withdraw from the labour market for long periods of time. Nevertheless, women earn on average about 10% less than men even when they work full-time and have similar education and labour market experience....