Gender earnings discrimination in Jordan: Good intentions are not enough

Jordan has long been a party to the main international instruments prohibiting discrimination against women, yet it still displays a significant gender pay gap. Using data from the 2002, 2006 and 2008 Household Expenditure and Income Surveys for decomposition analysis, while also accounting for the labour force participation decisions of women and men, the author finds that the pay gap is entirely explained by gender differentials in his estimated coefficients. The gap is initiated upon recruitment into wage employment through “screening discrimination”, though it tends to narrow over time. Women’s selectively low participation also contributes to a statistical improvement in their relative earnings. The problem of pay discrimination is a social problem where society does not see women’s contribution to the labour market to be on the same level or importance as that of men.1 J demonstrated precocious commitment to gender equity. After providing for equal pay in its Constitution, it ratified the ILO’s Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111), in 1963, the Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100), in 1966, and the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, in 1992. In 2011, in collaboration with the ILO, it set up its NSCPE with the mandate of developing a national strategy for pay equity. Despite all of these expressions of good intention, however, Jordan has yet to introduce anti-discrimination provisions in its domestic legislation and continues to display persistent and sizeable gender differentials in the monthly earnings of full-time workers, averaging 20 per cent in the public sector and 28 per cent in the private sector. * Department of Economics and Finance, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, email: ualfarhan@squ.edu. om. Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO. 1 Statement by the Secretary General of the Jordanian National Commission for Women and co-chair of the National Steering Committee on Pay Equity (NSCPE). See “Gender pay discrimination in Jordan: A call for change”, available at: http://www.ilo. org/global/about-the-ilo/ newsroom/features/WCMS_213754/lang--en/index.htm [accessed 7 November 2015]. International Labour Review 564 Against this background – and given the general lack of empirical evidence on the composition of gender earnings differentials in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – this article applies a standard extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique to analyse gender pay differentials in Jordan using data for 2002, 2006 and 2008. It represents the most inclusive effort on this topic in Jordan to date, providing empirical evidence on a phenomenon that is much in need of regulation. The remainder of the article is structured into five sections. The first briefly reviews the recent literature on countries of the region, and the second section describes the data set. The third section presents the methodology and the fourth reports the empirical results. The fifth section summarizes this article’s conclusions and policy recommendations.