Proceedings of the 2nd World Conference on Gender Equality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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HRM Bundles of Practices and Gender Pay Gap in the UK
Gabriela-Loredana Gherghina
ABSTRACT:
The gender pay gap, as one of the concerns of gender equality policies, currently an important worldwide HR issue (Bender and Pigeyre, 2016) has been declining slowly over time, falling by approximately a quarter over the last decade among full-time employees and all employees in the UK(ONS, 2023). Many companies are seeking to reduce it, for reasons of fairness and equity (Kim et al., 2019) and performance (Kossek and Buzzanell, 2018). Closing the gender pay gap may benefit women, and may also bolster business performance, strengthening the global economy (Noland, Moran, and Kotschwar, 2016). To identify and provide solutions to narrow the gap, much research aimed to identify its causes. Some of the explanations include the differences in human capital, employee ‘choices’ about part-time work, vertical and horizontal occupational segregation, the unequal division of household labour and discrimination. While the fact that the workplace HR practices shape inequalities in employment is well known (Appelbaum & Schmitt, 2009; Phillips, 2005), research on what form of practices might promote gender equality and under what conditions is more limited. The analysis of this research project will include 40 organisations. These will be selected form the total number of organisations that submit their figures about gender pay gap to the government website. The case selection is based on a maximum variation sampling strategy. This project uses two methods for data collection, aiming to gauge the required type of information: the narrative reports published by the organisations on their websites (secondary data) and semi-structured expert interviews with top management respondents from organisations (primary data).
keywords: organisations, narrative reports, sector, size