Women's participation in the Irish workforce was 61 per cent in the second quarter of 2023 (compared to 70.6 per cent for men), which is low by international standards. One of the more unusual aspects of the labour market here is the high rate of market income inequality – that is income before taxes and transfers. According to the OECD, we had the third-highest level of market income inequality in the industrialised world in 2021. In previous OECD reports, we’ve had the highest.
Remember, we are talking about pretax income here; when it comes to the spread of disposable income, Ireland is about average in OECD terms, reflecting the fact that we have a highly progressive tax system, a relatively large number of workers outside the tax net and a large number of middle-income earners paying the top rate of income tax. Divergence in gross pay nevertheless generates a lot of rancour. In the US, company bosses in the 1960s and 1970s might have earned 35 times their rank-and-file equivalents