Men’s earnings have fallen more than women’s since recession

Men’s pay has fallen much further in real terms than women’s pay, according to new figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

The IFS think tank studied pay for both sexes over the last seven years and found that, taking inflation into account, the average hourly wage for both men and women is still 4.7 per cent lower than it was in 2008, at the time of the financial crisis.

The drop in wages for women in real terms has been 2.5 per cent but, for men, it has been almost three times bigger, at 7.3 per cent.

The report by the IFS is based on its analysis of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). The survey looks at one in every hundred of all income tax returns from UK employees. The IFS compared the ASHE data from 2008 with the data from 2014.

One likely reason for the discrepancy between men and women’s earnings is that more women work in the public sector, where wages have fallen significantly less than earnings in the private sector.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies also found that the average wage of younger employees, that is those between 20 and 29, has fallen in real terms by as much as 9 per cent since 2008. The average wage of employees in their sixties, however, is now back at its 2008 level.

The number of employees who work part-time because their employers have not offered them more hours is nearly twice as high as in 2008.

The top ten per cent of earners have seen their earnings drop by nearly twice as much as the bottom ten per cent of earners. Those earning the highest wages have seen a fall in real terms of 6.4 per cent, in comparison with the bottom ten per cent, whose wages have only fallen by 3.3 per cent.