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on Gender |
| By: | Gallen, Yana (Harris School, University of Chicago); Lesner, Rune V. (Aarhus University); Vejlin, Rune Majlund (Aarhus University) |
| Abstract: | We document the declining gap between the average earnings of women and men in Denmark from 1980 to 2010. The decline in the earnings gap is driven by increased labor force participation and in-creases in hours worked by women, and to a smaller extent by a decline in the gender wage gap. The gap has declined least among higher earning women – the average wage of the top 10 percent of fe-male earners is 28-33% lower than the average wage of the top 10 percent of male earners. Women are becoming more educated and are a larger share of the professional labor force than in previous decades, but a substantial wage gap of about 10 percent remains for the youngest cohorts even after controlling for age, education, experience, occupation, and firm choice. Unlike the case of the US, dif-ferences in educational attainment, occupational choice, industry, and experience explained about 15 percentage points of the Danish wage gap in 1980, but now these factors explain only about 6 percent-age points of the Danish wage gap. In fact, though variation in the wage gap across occupations is sub-stantial, this variation is not correlated with the fraction of the occupation which is female. The data show a great deal of sorting and segregation across industries, occupations, and even firms. However, this sorting does not explain more than half of the wage gap. We conclude that a great deal of the re-maining disparity between the wages of women and men is tied to the differential effects of parenthood by gender. |
| Keywords: | gender pay gap, sorting |
| JEL: | J71 J31 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10789&r=gen |
| By: | Abrar Reshid, Abdulaziz (Department of Economics and Statistics, Linneaus University) |
| Abstract: | During the first 10 years in the Swedish labor market, male university graduates experience a faster wage growth than their female counterparts. This paper investigates the role of job mobility and upward occupational mobility in explaining the gender gap in early career wage growth. The analysis reveals that although job mobility and upward occupational mobility significantly contribute to the early career wage growth of both men and women, the size of the wage growth effect of both types of mobility is significantly lower for women. This female mobility penalty persists even after accounting for gender differences in observed individual and job characteristics, as well as unobserved individual specific heterogeneity. We further investigate to what extent this mobility penalty of women is explained by parental status. We find that the female penalty in returns to upward occupational mobility is largely linked to the timing of childbirth and childcare, which suggests the presence of a trade-off between work and family. Regarding job mobility, a significant female penalty is found among the childless as well as among parents, and anticipation of parenthood within the next year is found to exacerbate the female penalty in returns to job mobility even further. |
| Keywords: | gender gap; wage growth; job mobility; occupational mobility and children |
| JEL: | J13 J16 J31 J62 |
| Date: | 2017–05–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2017_005&r=gen |
| By: | Fraga, Eduardo (Yale University); Gonzaga, Gustavo (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)); Soares, Rodrigo R. (Columbia University) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the effect of selection on ability on the evolution of the gender wage gap during the first years of professional life. We use longitudinal data with 16 years of the early career history of formal sector workers in Brazil. The panel allows us to build a measure of unobserved ability that we use to analyze the dynamics of labor market selection across genders as individuals age. We focus on the cohort born in 1974, for which we have a close to complete history of formal labor market participa-tion. For this cohort, the average ability of formally employed men improved in relation to that of women during the first years of professional life. The selection of men and women into the labor mar-ket was similar at age 21, but by age 31 high‐ability men (one standard deviation above the mean) had a probability of employment 1.6 percentage point higher than their high‐ability female counter-parts. This contributed to the increase in the conditional gender wage gap observed in the early career, as the ability distribution of employed women deteriorated in relation to that of employed men. Our estimates suggest that, for the 1974 cohort, this mechanism explains 32% of the cumulative growth in the conditional gender wage gap between ages 21 and 36. |
| Keywords: | gender wage gap, selection, ability, lifecycle |
| JEL: | J16 J21 J31 J71 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10791&r=gen |
| By: | Humlum, Maria Knoth (Aarhus University); Nandrup, Anne Brink (Aarhus University); Smith, Nina (Aarhus University) |
| Abstract: | Over the last decade, the economic literature has increasingly focused on the importance of gender identity and sticky gender norms in an attempt to explain the persistence of the gender gaps. Using detailed register data on the latest cohorts of Danish labour market entrants, this paper examines the intergenerational correlation in gender-stereotypical choice of education. Although to some extent picking up inherited and acquired skills, our results suggest that if parents exhibit gender stereotypical labour market behaviour, children of the same sex are more likely to choose a gender stereotypical education. The associations are strongest for sons. Exploiting the detailed nature of our data, we use birth order and sibling sex composition to shed light on the potential channels through which gender differences in educational preferences are transmitted across generations. We propose that such transmissions may attenuate the final closing of the gender gap. |
| Keywords: | intergenerational transmission, gender differences, gender identity, social norms |
| JEL: | I23 J16 J24 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10790&r=gen |
| By: | Lundberg, Shelly (University of California, Santa Barbara) |
| Abstract: | The educational attainment of young women now exceeds that of young men in most of the devel-oped world, and women account for about 60% of new four-year college graduates in the United States. Several studies have suggested that the increase in single-parent households may be contributing to the growing gender gap in education, as boys are more vulnerable to the negative effects of father absence and economic disadvantage than girls. Using data on recent cohorts of young men and women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I find evi-dence consistent with other studies that boys are relatively more likely to experience problems in school, including school suspensions, when their father is absent, but also that girls are relatively more likely to experience depression in adolescence, particularly in step-father families. By the time Add Health subjects are young adults, there is no evidence that father absence early in life is more strongly associated with lower rates of college graduation for men, compared to women, in either cross-sectional or family fixed-effect models. |
| Keywords: | education, college graduation, gender, family structure, father absence, school quality |
| JEL: | I20 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10814&r=gen |
| By: | Crosetto, Paolo (Université de Grenoble); Filippin, Antonio (University of Milan) |
| Abstract: | Gender differences in risk attitudes are frequently observed, although recent literature has shown that they are context dependent rather than ubiquitous. In this paper we try to rationalize the hetero-geneity of results investigating experimentally whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives explains why females are more risk averse than males. We manipulate three widely used risk elicitation methods finding that the availability of a safe option causally affects risk attitudes. The presence of a riskless alternative does not entirely explain the gender gap but it has a significant effect in triggering or magnifying (when already present) such differences. Despite the pronounced instability that usually characterizes the measurement of risk preferences, we show estimating a structural model that the effect of a safe option is remarkably stable across tasks. This paper constitutes the first suc-cessful attempt to shed light on the determinants of gender differences in risk attitudes. |
| Keywords: | gender differences, risk attitudes, experiment, safe option |
| JEL: | C81 C91 D81 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10793&r=gen |
| By: | Kato, Takao (Colgate University); Kodama, Naomi (Hitotsubashi University) |
| Abstract: | We review recent studies on management practices and their consequences for women in the work-place. First, the High Performance Work System (HPWS) is associated with greater gender diversity in the workplace while there is little evidence that the HPWS reduces the gender pay gap. Second, work-life balance practices with limited face-to-face interactions with coworkers may hamper women’s ca-reer advancement. Third, individual incentive linking pay to objective performance may enhance gen-der diversity while individual incentive with subjective performance may have an opposite effect. Fourth, a rat race model with working hours as a signal of the worker’s commitment is a promising way to explain the gender gap in promotions. Fifth, corporate social responsibility practices may increase gender diversity. We temper the findings by identifying three major methodological challenges: (i) how to measure management practices; (ii) how to account for endogeneity of management practices; and (iii) how to minimize selection bias. |
| Keywords: | pay for performance, incentive pay, family-friendly practices, work-life balance, high performance work system, management practices, gender pay gap, gender diversity in the labor market, promotion tournament, rat races, corporate social responsibility |
| JEL: | J16 M5 J7 M14 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10788&r=gen |
| By: | Kumar, Santosh (Sam Houston State University); Prakash, Nishith (University of Connecticut) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we investigate the impacts of political decentralization and women reservation in local governance on institutional births and child mortality in the state of Bihar, India. Using the difference-in-differences methodology, we find a significant positive association between political decentralization and institutional births. We also find that the increased participation of women at local governance led to an increased survival rate of children belonging to richer households. We argue that our results are consistent with female leaders having policy preference for women and child well-being. |
| Keywords: | gender quota, political decentralization, institutional delivery, child, mortality, Bihar, India |
| JEL: | H41 I15 J16 O12 |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10780&r=gen |
| By: | Gabor Hajdu (Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and MTA-ELTE Peripato Comparative Social Dynamics Research Group, Hungary); Tamas Hajdu (Institute of Economics, Research Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between intra-couple income distribution and subjective well-being, using nationally representative data from Hungary. We show that the association between the woman’s relative income (the woman’s share of the couple’s total earnings) and life satisfaction is negative not only for men, but for women as well. Because we control for financial disadvantages on the individual and household level, as well as for socio-economic and job characteristics of the respondent and their partner, the result can be interpreted as the impact of traditional gender roles and the persistence of the traditional male breadwinner mentality. In addition, we show that gender norms moderate this negative association. Among those with low levels of traditional norms, the woman’s relative income has no effect on life satisfaction, whereas among those who prefer traditional gender roles, the negative association is stronger. Our results suggest that conflicts between the gender norms and the social and economic reality reduce life satisfaction. |
| Keywords: | intra-couple income distribution; life satisfaction; gender norms; relative income |
| JEL: | I31 D10 J16 |
| Date: | 2017–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:1711&r=gen |