Pay in South Africa: men vs women
Financial services firm PwC has published the findings from its latest remuneration report, showing the great divide between the pay of men and women.
The group surveyed the most recent annual reports of all 373 JSE-listed companies with a total market capitalisation of around R7.860 trillion and found that while female representation is still growing and that board representation is improving, it’s still at a relatively slow pace.
PwC’s fifth edition of the Executive Directors’ Remuneration – Practices and Trends Report: South Africa 2013, found that in 2012, average female representation on the JSE was 8%, up from the prior year’s 4.2%. In 2013, that figure improved to 10%.
PwC went to great lengths to explain what the gender pay equity actually means.
“At first, it meant equal pay for equal work. However, as organisations tried to achieve equal pay, they quickly realised that it was very difficult to compare two jobs at the same level and their compensation, since each job comprised a different set of tasks,” it said.
The following definition was finally arrived at: “Equal pay for different but equivalent work”.
The financial services group pointed to a statistic from the South African Revenue Service which showed that the percentage of female taxpayers has been steadily increasing over the last few years.
For the 2011 tax year, females accounted for 44.3% of the assessed individual taxpayers, earning 36.3% of the taxable income and contributing 29.6% of tax assessed.
Females on average earned a taxable income of R160,702 and were liable for tax of R26,919 at an effective rate of 16.8%, as opposed to males, who earned an average taxable income of
R223,550 and were liable for tax of R50,885 at an effective rate of 22.8%.
“From the aforementioned statistics it is evident that females on average earn 28.1% less than males as measured through taxable income and are liable for 47.1% less tax than their male counterparts,” PwC said.
This, it added, is further supported by PwC’s REMchannel on line salary survey, where female CEOs in small-, medium- and large-cap organisations accounted on average for 12% in comparison to the 88% representation by their male counterparts.
In addition, 22% of the male CEOs were paid in the upper quartile of the market while only 2.5% of females were paid at the same level.
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