James Brown would have to change the lyrics of his famous song because for women in Slovenia they are treated fairly in comparison to their male colleagues.
So much so, that they earn, on average, more than their male counterparts.
However, for women workers in Japan it’s still very much a man’s world.
These are the findings of a study carried out by three universities which can be distilled in to a single sentence: women are better off without men.
That’s to say that when women work in industries not dominated by men, they earn relatively more money.
In Slovenia, the men might have cause for complaint as the research found women earn slightly more, on average, than them.
Pay gap
Academics from Warwick Business School, University of Cambridge and Lakehead in Canada studied 20 industrialised nations, and they say that when men and women compare wage packets from different occupations, there wasn’t much pay inequality between them.
Japan is home to the biggest pay gap between men and women, Slovenia is the narrowest and Mexico, Hungary, Brazil and South Africa all paid almost equal amounts to men and women.
Researchers say they found the biggest pay gaps came in countries where men and women did the same work.
Their study found that women in Austria, Holland and the Czech Republic were the worst at paying equal rates for people doing the same job.
The UK was also higher than the average, below the USA and Russia but above Germany.
One of the academics behind the research, Dr Girts Racko, explained that when there are fewer men in an occupation, women have increased opportunity to reach the top of their profession and earn more.
Women dominate
“We found that when men and women are segregated, the male advantage is reduced and improves the chances of women,” he said.
“There’s also less opportunity for the discrimination of women and women have more scope to develop progressive careers.”
He pointed to the nursing sector, which has a disproportionate number of men in senior positions, while women dominate because so few men pursue nursing as a career.
He also added that, contrary to popular belief, that where there is a higher overall segregation in an industry, the lower the advantage is for men.
Dr Racko said: “That’s perhaps the most important finding, that in highly developed industrialised nations, the overall segregation and the vertical pay gap is inversely related. This is contrary to popular assumption.”
