'In what ways, and to what extent do males and females have different experiences in the labour market? ' This report will look at the findings of the 'SPSS' project and try to think why these results may be so.
The bullet points of this report will be covered in the 'PowerPoint' document: - spssproject-presentation-StephenWatt. doc How the results were obtained In the spss syntax window the file 'p:courseworkcitassprojectspssdata. sav' was obtained by using the command 'get file'. The 'freq vars' command was used for the category 'male' to observe the distribution of males to females.This was carried out to check that the survey was not biased by being completed mainly by only males or only females. There was a 52% female to 48% male split so it was quite even.
Using the 'temporary' command temporary changes could be made to the data set by using the 'select if' command. These commands used in conjunction restrict the data set for the next command only then it reverts back to the way it was. Through the 'temporary' and 'select if' commands when status equals 1, the data set was restricted to only self-employed respondents.Then with the 'freq vars' command the number of self-employed females and self-employed males were extracted.
At the same time the ratio of females to males in this sub-sample were calculated. The process was repeated for the other three employment statuses so that the gender difference could be observed. Next the 'select if' command for status 2 was used without the 'temporary' command. This restricted the data set for the rest of the observations to only the employed respondents.
Then all the observations from then on were extracted from the data via the 'temporary' and 'select if' commands; restricting the data set to firstly females then males (male=0 or male=1) for each observation. The average number of hours worked in a normal week was calculated, for both males and females, by using the 'desc vars' command within the category 'hours1'. The average number of hours over time worked by males and females was calculated by the same method only this time from the category 'hours2'. The category 'weekpay' shows the last wage the respondent received divided by the number of weeks worked the pay was for.
Therefore it is the pro rata weekly wage rate. Again using the 'desc vars' command the average weekly wage rate was calculated for both females and males. The problem with this observation is that men seem to be working on average more hours in a normal week than females. They are also working more over time on average than females and over time is usually paid at one and a half times the normal wage. Therefore there will be a large gap between the weekly wage rate of males and females even if they are both receiving the same wage rate.To combat this problem the average pro rata hourly wage rate was calculated, for both males and females, with the 'freq vars' command.
The category 'wagerate' was used this is category is calculated by dividing 'weekpay' by 'hours3 (number of hours worked +(over time *1. 5))' To find out the different prospects facing each gender the 'freq vars' command was used to find out the number of males and females supervised others and how many of them believed they had some prospects of promotion in their current job.The satisfaction each gender took from their work with regards to; overall job satisfaction, pay, job security, and the actual work done, was extracted from the categories 'jobsatn', 'jobsatn1', 'jobsatn2', 'jobsatn3'. According to the TUC females' health risks at work are being ignored. They say female workers are more prone to work related illness (such as back pain and eyestrain) than men are. {BBC News.
Wednesday, August 25, 1999. http://news. bbc. co.
uk/hi/english/health/newsid_329000/329789. stm}To check if this was the case within this sample, the category 'health' was inspected by the 'freq vars' and the 'desc vars' command. The number of males and females who received education or training in the last year from an educational institution was observed. This was to see if this was a possible cause for a difference in the average wage rate between males and females. Finally the number of female and male respondents who contributed towards a works pension were extracted to see if there was a gender difference in this area.The results obtained and how they may be interpreted Employment status The results in this sample showed that 72.
5% of self-employed respondents were males. The majority of unemployed respondents were also males (65%). However 66% of the respondents who were classified as being out of the labour force were females. Hours worked and wage rate The average working week for the male respondents lasted 40 hours. For females however that figure dropped to 30 hours. This is probably because more women in this sample worked on a temporary or contract basis than men did.
A possible reason for this may be that the women are working part time to care for their children. Males on average also did more hours over time than females. This may be caused by discrimination by employers when allocating over time or again it could be because of the different responsibilities society places on the different genders. "The study, by the Equal Opportunities Commission's Equal Pay Task Force, found that Scottish women who work full time can expect to take home 80% of their male colleague's salary..
. It also says that women are still being paid substantially less than men"
