nep-gen New Economics Papers
on Gender
Issue of 2018‒01‒15
five papers chosen by
Jan Sauermann
Stockholms universitet

  1. Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review. By Hengel, E.; ; ;
  2. Parenthood, Family Friendly Firms, and the Gender Gaps in Early Work Careers By V. Joseph Hotz; Per Johansson; Arizo Karimi
  3. Gender Gap and Trade Liberalization: An Analysis of some selected SAARC countries By Audi, Marc; Ali, Amjad
  4. Estimating gender wage gap in the presence of efficiency wages -- evidence from European data By Katarzyna Bech; Joanna Tyrowicz
  5. THE CONTRIBUTION OF MULTINATIONALS TO WAGE INEQUALITY: FOREIGN OWNERSHIP AND THE GENDER PAY GAP By Priit Vahter, Jaan Masso

  1. By: Hengel, E.; ; ;
    Abstract: I use readability scores to test if referees and/or editors apply higher standards to women's writing in academic peer review. I find: (i) female-authored papers are 1-6 percent better written than equivalent papers by men; (ii) the gap is two times higher in published articles than in earlier, draft versions of the same papers; (iii) women's writing gradually improves but men's does not-meaning the readability gap grows over authors' careers. In a dynamic model of an author's decision-making process, I show that tougher editorial standards and/or biased referee assignment are uniquely consistent with this pattern of choices. A conservative causal estimate derived from the model suggests senior female economists write at least 9 percent more clearly than they otherwise would. These findings indicate that higher standards burden women with an added time tax and probably contribute to academia's "Publishing Paradox" Consistent with this hypothesis, I find female-authored papers spend six months longer in peer review. More generally, tougher standards impose a quantity/quality tradeoff that characterises many instances of female output. They could resolve persistently lower-otherwise unexplained-female productivity in many high-skill occupations.
    Date: 2017–12–04
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cam:camdae:1753&r=gen
  2. By: V. Joseph Hotz; Per Johansson; Arizo Karimi
    Abstract: We consider the role that firm attributes play in accounting for the divergence in the careers of women and men, with the onset of parenthood. We exploit a matched employer-employee data set from Sweden that provides a rich set of firm and worker attributes. We index firms by their “family friendliness” and analyze the effect of firm family friendliness on the career gap between mothers and fathers. We find that women disproportionately sort into family friendly firms after first birth and that the wage penalty to motherhood is diminished by being assigned to a more family friendly firm or job. We also find that working in a more family friendly firm or job diminishes the parenthood penalty to labor earnings and makes it easier for mothers to work more hours. At the same time, the smaller wage and income penalties to parents from working in family friendly firms and jobs come at the expense of their occupational progression, especially among mothers, impeding their ability to climb career ladders. Finally, we find that family friendly jobs are more easily substitutable for one another. This latter finding suggests that family friendly firms are able to accommodate the family responsibilities of their workers while still managing to keep their costs low. Our findings also suggest that paid parental leave with job protection – which are features of the Swedish context – may not be sufficient to achieve the balancing of career and family responsibilities, but that the way firms and jobs are structured can play a crucial role in facilitating this balance.
    JEL: J13 J16 J24 J31 J62
    Date: 2017–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24173&r=gen
  3. By: Audi, Marc; Ali, Amjad
    Abstract: Trade liberalization plays a significant role in the development of an economy as all countries have insufficient resources and depend on trade to grow and prosper. The key objective of this study is to explore the relationship of trade liberalization on women empowerment. It also aims to find out whether it is beneficial for gender gap or not. This study utilizes the sample of five SAARC countries for the time period of 15 years, that is, from 2000 to 2014. It emphasizes on tariffs and regulatory trade barriers, which are considered significant indicators of trade liberalization, along with the freedom of trade, that is a composite index. The gender gap is measured through the female to male participation rate, whereas, gender development index(GDI) is used as a relative measure of women empowerment after adjusting HDI for gender disparity in three dimensions. The other control variable incorporated in this study includes: gross domestic product growth, education of female, female unemployment rate and the hiring regulations & minimum wage standards. The econometric technique applied is the pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) method along with various diagnostic tests. When trade liberalization goes up, it increases the GDI, meaning lower gender disparity, which in turn refers to greater women empowerment. The research concludes that whenever the trade liberalization increases, it does not reduce the gender gap, which means the female to male participation rate goes down. It encourages women to actively participate in the labor market, but it does not play a role in reducing gender gap. Education of female is essential because it creates awareness among girls and enhances their skills, which leads to empowering women, making them self-sufficient and active participants in the economic activity, which can improve their standard of living.
    Keywords: Gender Gap, Trade liberalization
    JEL: F1 J0
    Date: 2017–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:83485&r=gen
  4. By: Katarzyna Bech (Warsaw School Economics); Joanna Tyrowicz (Group for Research in Applied Economics (GRAPE); University of Warsaw; Institut für Arbeitsrecht und Arbeitsbeziehungen in der Europäischen Union (IAAEU); Institute of Labor Economics (IZA))
    Abstract: Gender wage gap (adjusted for individual characteristics) as a phenomenon means that women are paid unjustifiably less than men, i.e. below their productivity. Meanwhile, efficiency wages as a phenomenon mean that a group of workers is paid in excess of productivity. However, productivity is typically unobservable, hence it is proxied by some observable characteristics. If efficiency wages are effective only in selected occupations and/or industries, and these happen to be dominated by men, measures of adjusted gender wage gaps will confound (possibly) below productivity compensating of women with above productivity efficiency wage prevalence. We propose to utilize endogenous switching models to estimate adjusted gender wage gaps. We find that without correction for the prevalence of efficiency wages, the estimates of the adjusted gender wage gaps tend to be substantially inflated.
    Keywords: efficiency wages, gender wage gap, endogenous switching regressions
    JEL: J16 J33 J71
    Date: 2017
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fme:wpaper:20&r=gen
  5. By: Priit Vahter, Jaan Masso
    Abstract: While an abundance of studies exists documenting the significant wage premium of multinationals (MNE) and the effects of foreign direct investments (FDI) on wage inequality, much less is still known about how foreign ownership affects the gender wage gap of employees in firms. Based on employer-employee level data from Estonia – a country with the largest gender wage gap in the EU – this study highlights the regularity that foreign owned firms display on average a substantially larger gender wage gap than domestically owned firms. Among different occupation groups, this result is especially evident among managers. Furthermore, this difference is also evident if we focus on acquisitions of domestic firms by MNEs and estimate its effects based on propensity score matching. The resulting increase in gender wage gap is due to men capturing a higher wage premium from working at foreign owned firms than women, although both tend to gain in terms of wages from being employed at MNEs. We find evidence (albeit limited) suggesting that one of the explanations of the difference in the gender wage gap between foreign-owned and domestically-owned firms could potentially be that MNEs require more of a continuous commitment from their employees compared to other firms.
    Keywords: FDI, foreign ownership, wages, gender wage gap
    JEL: F10 F23 J16 J31
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mtk:febawb:106&r=gen

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