WHY do women earn less than men? The usual suspects – occupation, hours, experience – explain some of it. But a powerful, often overlooked reason is simply this: where women work. The companies that hire them play a huge role in shaping their lifetime earnings. South Africa has a severe gender pay gap, much of which is unexplained by worker characteristics such as occupation, skills or experience. In our new study published in the Journal of Development Economics, using tax data on the universe of formal workers in South Africa, we uncover a striking fact: nearly half of the gender…