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Full-time female employees in Singapore got 14.3% less pay than male counterparts in 2023: MOM study
The gender pay gap in Singapore was 6% in 2023 after adjusting for human capital and labour market forces.
SINGAPORE — Full-time female employees aged 25 to 54 earned 14.3 per cent lower than their male counterparts in 2023, said the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in an updated infographic on Singapore's adjusted gender pay gap released on 4 March.
This was a decrease from a gap of 16.3 per cent in 2018, MOM noted.
Updated findings from the study, which was originally released in January 2020 and conducted by the MOM and the National University of Singapore (NUS), revealed that Singapore's adjusted gender pay gap was 6.0 per cent after accounting for human capital and labour market factors. This figure is lower than the adjusted gender pay gap of 6.8 per cent in 2018.
The unadjusted median gender pay gap is a comparison between the median pay of working women relative to that of men. On the other hand, the adjusted gender pay gap provides a more like-for-like comparison by measuring the gender pay gap between working men and women with the same characteristics in terms of age, education, occupation, industry, and usual hours worked.
The study analysed the gross monthly income, including employer CPF contributions, of full-time employees who are Singaporeans and permanent residents aged 25 to 54.
Occupational differences a key driver of gender pay gap
The study noted that among the labour market factors examined, occupation differences remained a key driver of the gender pay gap in 2023. It accounted for 6.1 percentage points of the unadjusted gender pay gap. Other labour market factors that were examined for the study include industry factors (1.4 percentage points) and usual hours worked (0.6 percentage points).
Additionally, the study found that the gender pay gap narrowed from 2018 to 2023 as women's occupational profiles improved more than men's. The improvements in women's occupational profiles are most noticeable in the professional, managerial, executive, and technician (PMET) category.
A total of 75 per cent of women held a PMET job in 2023, an increase of 8.8 percentage points from 2018. In comparison, the number of men who held PMET jobs increased by 6.3 percentage points in 2023, rising from 73.1 per cent in 2018 to 79.4 per cent in 2023.
There were also fewer women working as clerical support, service and sales workers (CSSW) in 2023, declining from 27.9 per cent in 2018 to 21.3 per cent in 2023. The number of men in the CSSW category also declined in 2023, albeit smaller, from 13.1 per cent in 2018 to 11 per cent in 2023.
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