Women in the Republic are more likely to be low paid than those in Northern Ireland, according to a report.
The report’s authors suggested that a more narrow gender pay gap in Northern Ireland was because of a higher percentage of public sector workers in the region.
The study looked at pay, education and levels of women’s participation in the workforce and what influence factors such as childcare have on female employment.
It found that women’s participation in the labour force is at 76 per cent in the Republic and 72 per cent in the North, compared with 88 per cent and 81 per cent for men in the Republic and North respectively.
The gender pay gap among full-time workers is higher south of the Border than north, and women are 21 per cent more likely to be part-time workers in both jurisdictions.
The report, which warned that pay comparisons “should be treated with some caution”, found that women were more likely to be low paid in the Republic than in Northern Ireland.
Some 25 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men in the Republic were classified as ‘low paid’ according to the research, while 21 per cent of women and 14 per cent of men in Northern Ireland were classified as low-paid or earn less than two-thirds of the median hourly pay.
One of the researchers, Garance Hingre, said that the proportion of people classified as ‘high earners’ and ‘low earners’ was greater in Ireland than north of the border, and “suggests that earnings may be more unequal in Ireland than in Northern Ireland”.
“Working in the private sector is associated with a higher probability of being low paid,” she said.
Professor Helen Russell of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) said they roughly estimated public sector workers as those employed in the health, education, public administration and defence sectors.
In Northern Ireland, 53 per cent of working women work in those sectors while south of the border it is around 43 per cent, she said.
“In general, that’s having a protective effect so they have a lower risk of being in the low pay group,” she said.
“We’ve seen this in lots of other research as well that that actually tends to narrow the gender pay gap if you’ve got more people in the public sector, so I think that’s probably some of what’s going on.”
Prof Russell also said the educational differences between north and south were “quite stark”, and the research also found that higher education offered strong protection against low pay in both jurisdictions.
Ms Hingre highlighted graphs that indicated the gender pay gap between men and women both north and south of the border fell as levels of education increased.
Prof Russell also said that Ireland and the UK usually feature in the bottom end of international comparisons of childcare affordability, another factor influencing women’s participation in the workforce.
Some 75 per cent of employed men in the Republic and 56 per cent of employed men in Northern Ireland work more than 38 hours a week, while for women in the Republic and Northern Ireland the figures are 43 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.
Part-time workers, considered to work less than 30 hours a week, were significantly more likely to be women – 29 per cent of employed women compared with 9 per cent of men in the Republic, and 35 per cent of employed women compared with 9 per cent of men in Northern Ireland.
Equality commissioner for Northern Ireland Darren McKinstry said there appeared to be a fragility to the labour market in Northern Ireland, evidenced by shorter periods in education, lower accessibility of childcare, and the higher proportion of women working part-time.
He said that education was key in building up resilience to “challenge that fragility” and said the “value of flexibility” was important, such as access to childcare or for “sandwich care” – caring for the young and the elderly.
Dr Iris Elliot, head of policy and research at the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, said that there were some figures on disability in the report, but none around race or ethnicity, which are known factors that influence workforce participation and pay.
She said there may be a false perception that there is progress on equality issues in the Republic in the wake of the recent referendum results.
She also raised the importance of comparable data between north and south, which could be more difficult after Brexit.
This is the 12th report from ESRI carried out in partnership with the Shared Island initiative.
