India's gender wage gap at non-supervisory level grew by 5%, though dropped by 8% among supervisors: Report

By Our Representative
In an important revelation, Monster India, claiming to the country’s “leading online career and recruitment resource with its cutting edge technology”, has said that while the supervisory gender wage gap may have dropped has last year by 8.1 percentage points (from 28.1% to 20%), at the non-supervisory level it has “grown by 5 percentage points.”
Pointing out that in 2016 the “supervisors earned 48.3% more than non-supervisors, compared to 38.5% in 2015 and 2014”, a report released by the high-profile consulting firm regrets, “Non-supervisors do not seem to profit much from the economic upswing of the country.”
Pointing out that the “hourly wages for non-supervisors rose by just INR 9.9 (4.5%)” last year, the report sees a clear-cut gap here also: “Female employees in supervisory positions experienced a rise in wages of INR 87.0 (33.5%) compared to only 1.1% for female non-supervisors.”
Pointing towards a “two-fold” trend, the report, titled, Monster Salary Index 2016: Gender pay report- Ready reckoner”, says, “The gender pay gap at supervisory level has dropped from 2015 to 2016 by 8.1 percentage points”, but “contrary to this, the gap at non-supervisory level has grown by 5 percentage points between 2015 and 2016.”
Calculating hourly wages, the report, which is based data from the Indian market, examines eight different urban-based sectors, but does not looks into such sectors like agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, electricity, gas and water supply.
The data from the Indian market analysed in this report are classified into eight different sectors: Legal and market consultancy, business activities; Information and Communication Technology (ICT); Health Care, Caring services, Social work; Education and Research; Financial Services, Banking, Insurance; Transport, Logistics, Communication; Construction and Technical Consultancy; Manufacturing.
“As the analysed data was gathered online, it has some specific characteristics, such as the sectoral structure of collected observations”, the report notes, adding, “The majority of observations comes from these three sectors: Financial services, banking, insurance (23%), Manufacturing (22%), and ICT (18%).”
The report says, “The analysis presented in this report is based on the WageIndicator dataset covering the period of 3 years, from January 2014 to December 2016”, adding, “This report provides a comparison of wage and working conditions figures for three periods: calendar year 2014, calendar year 2015 and calendar year 2016.”
“The wage analysis is based on data collected from paycheck.in, Salary Calculator and Monster Salary Index from the aforementioned periods. The sample used for the analysis consists of 20,350 respondents, approximately 85.02% of which are men and 14.98% women”, the report says.
“The sample contains only employees; wages of self-employed people are excluded. Employees from different age groups, industries, and various hierarchical positions in their respective occupations are included in the sample”, the report says.
WageIndicator and Paycheck India regularly survey and evaluate the Indian market. Set up as an online volunteer survey, the data primarily stems from those people with access to the internet and who are interested in completing the questionnaire. Due to this limitation, the data mainly covers India’s formal sector.