What Factors Affect the Gender Pay Gap in the UK Industries - Essay Example

This research will take both a mixed method approach where both qualitative and quantitative methods will be applied. The incorporation of a mixed method approach will help increase reliability while increasing both internal and external validity. The qualitative method will be used in order to explain the beliefs and the behaviors that surrounds gender pay gap. This method will involve interviews with various individuals that will shed light on the disparity in pay between men and women. The interviews will involve corporate managers; ten shall be interviewed where at least four should be of the opposite gender.

In addition, employees drawn from various sectors will be interviewed. Ten companies that are involved in manufacturing of various products and provision of diverse services will be chosen, for every organization, one individual shall be interviewed. In this case, at least 40% of the interviewees should be of the opposite gender. For the quantitative research, a survey of the payments of individuals across various industries will be done. This data shall be provided under the consent of the management of the respective organizations.

Payment data from twenty-five organizations shall be collected. This will help create an understanding of the disparities in gender across occupations as pointed out by Farrell. Both research methods will adhere to ethical standards of research. Firstly, there will be informed consent for both the interviewees as well as the management shall be aware of the use of the payment data. Another aspect is confidentiality; both the interviewee’s information as well as their individuality will be kept confidential, the same will apply to the payment data that is meant for survey purposes.

The variables under considerations are two; gender (dependent) and the independent variable will be payment. A relationship will be drawn between the two from the quantitative data obtained through the surveys.