Page 33 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 7

CPS2021 Noor Ismawati et al.
Monetary reward was identified as one of the top motivation factor (Wiley,
1997) to stay in employment, however, inter-gender gap factor in earning
could be one of the strong drive in pulling the female employees from
remaining in the labour force (Nor’Aznin Abu Bakar and Norehan Abdullah,
2017). In recognising the role of women in national development, a quota of
at least 30 per cent of decision-making positions was allocated to women in
the public sector (Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister's Department,
2006). The private sector and NGOs were also encouraged to increase the
participation of women in managerial and key positions. Initiatives were
planned in increasing the number of talented women returning to the
workforce (Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister's Department, 2015). The
initiatives to produce more women leaders in the public sector had shown
great progress with women accounting for 35.6 per cent of top management
positions in 2017 as compared to 32.5 per cent in 2015, beyond the 30 per
cent target (Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister's Department, 2018).
Malaysia gender gap index (MGGI) for 2017 was 0.697 (Department of
Statistics Malaysia, 2017e) comprising four selected domains i.e. Economic
participation & opportunity (0.659), Educational attainment (1.092), Healths &
survival (0.957) and Political empowerment (0.061).
As the earning in public and private sector differs significantly in Malaysia,
the paper investigates the effect of socio-demographic factors on earning for
both sector by gender. Even though the analysis was done for four sub
samples, the result and discussion of this paper only covers female paid
employee and limited to the social-demographic variables.

2. Methodology
The analysis is done based on Salaries and Wages Survey conducted in
2010 until 2017 administrated by the Department of Statistics Malaysia. The
population of the survey is paid employees who live in private living quarters.
The details on principal occupation and demographic background of all paid
employees in the household were collected for the respective reference
month. Paid employees is defined as individuals who are working full-time,
working at least 6 hours a day or at least 20 days a month, contract workers in
the government sector, individuals who receive monthly regular and periodic
allowances or volunteers who receive fixed allowances (Department of
Statistics Malaysia, 2016). The survey covers both urban and rural areas for all
administrative districts within all states in the country. The sample was
represented by 175,994 female employees aged between 15 and 64 in the
respective years of observation. The whole sample comprised of 29.8 per cent
of employees in the public sector and 70.2 per cent in the private sector. The
sample excluded non-citizen.

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