Predicting Gender Pay Gap in Ireland
Goal
This project develops a predictive model to understand what drives gender pay gaps among large Irish companies following Ireland’s Gender Pay Gap Information Act (2022). Using a dataset of 1,945 company reports from PayGap.ie (2022–2024), we analyzed how factors such as industry, bonus structures, part-time pay gaps, and gender composition relate to differences in mean hourly pay.
What I did
In this project, I did the following:
- Extracted 10 relevant predictors among 29 other correlated variables.
- Compiled summary statistics for the 10 predictors + outcome variable
- Visualized the distribution of all 11 variables
- Performed best model selection through the following methods
- Best subset selection
- Forward selection
- Backward selection
All three methods indicates that the full model is the best.
Results
Our final model shows the following factors affect the mean hourly pay gap between male and female in Ireland:
- The year in which the data was collected
- Mean gap in yearly bonus
- Median gap in yearly bonus
- Mean hourly part-time wage
- Percentage of female employees that received a bonus
- Percentage of female employees that received a benefit in kind
- Percentage of female employees
Specifically, the mean gap in hourly wage between the two genders have decreased by .64% on average each year from 2022 to 2024.
Full Report
You can read the complete project report below. I have also attached the GitHub link to the project at the bottom of the page.