Gender gap in pay is not the only issue confronting women. Even those who earn more than men have to bear the brunt of social prejudice.

A recent World Bank report on gender differences at workplace highlights this unfairness. No country in the world accords women the same opportunities as men in the workforce, finds the Women, Business and the Law report, which studied the laws that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies.

The 10th edition of the report, for the first time, went beyond the law books to assess the gap between laws and the policies put in place to implement them. While 95 countries enacted laws on equal pay, only 35 had measures in place to ensure equal pay.

Even when laws are made, their effectiveness is conditioned by conventional social norms in an environment where women are seen as less valuable than men. One study by Bhalotra et al, which examined the impact of legal reforms that grant women equal rights to inherit property in India, found that the first-born child after the reform was enacted was less likely to be a girl.

Reforms’ perverse impact

Perversely, the reform had led to increase in female foeticide, excess female infant mortality and son-biased fertility stopping.

Long before the amendment to the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act was enacted in 1994 to eradicate female foeticide. But patriarchal norms change slowly, if at all. And legislation alone cannot change the social mindset. Unless the collective will of the society is changed to value daughters as much as sons, laws will remain ineffective.

The World Bank report also found that the global gender gap was much wider than assumed. Women earn just 77 cents for every dollar paid to men, and closing the gap could raise global GDP by more than 20 per cent, said the report. But men are particularly unhappy with their spouses’ financial successes. An Australian National University study found that women who earn more than their male partners face 33 per cent higher partner violence and 20 per cent higher emotional abuse.

This did not hold when the husband earned more. The study points out that for men, earning more than half of the couple’s income represents compliance with the norm of male breadwinning.

In a paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, economists Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan say that in couples where the wife’s potential income is likely to exceed the husband’s, she is less likely to be in the labour force.

The authors also found that where the wife earns more than the husband, she spends more time on household chores. And those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. These studies show the widespread existence of sexism in spite of laws, policies and regulations aimed at preventing them.

In our day-to-day lives, we may not realise that we are contributing to these problems. So fixing these problems is an individual responsibility. This calls for introspection. Ask the women in your lives what you can do to make their lives better.

As Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan once said, “Old habits die hard, but these are surely worth killing.”