South Africa ' s gender pay gap cannot be understood by comparing individual salaries alone. Unequal pay inside a workplace matters, but inequality can take root earlier – in the sector a woman enters, the occupation available to her and the employer she is able to reach.
Research by economists Ihsaan Bassier of the University of Surrey and Leila Gautham of the University of Leeds makes that distinction clear. Their study, published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2025, tracked millions of formal-sector workers through administrative tax records from 2010 to 2018.
Women in the dataset earned an average of 12 % less than men. About 45 % of that gap – equivalent to 5.5 percentage points – was associated with women being concentrated in companies that paid all their workers less.
That finding does not mean that the remaining 55 % is a measure of direct pay discrimination. The researchers say it may reflect unmeasured differences between workers as well as bias operating across the labour market. Their data also covers formal-sector firms only, excluding informal workers and self-employment. Even with those limitations, the study shifts the question. The issue is not only whether women and men receive equal pay inside the same workplace, but whether they have equal access to the employers that pay better in the first place.
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