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on Gender |
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Issue of 2022‒08‒15
eight papers chosen by Jan Sauermann Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | Karen Dynan (Peterson Institute for International Economics); Jacob Funk Kirkegaard (Peterson Institute for International Economics); Anna Stansbury (Peterson Institute for International Economics) |
| Abstract: | Although the South Korean economy fared relatively well on the whole during the pandemic, the labor market consequences were uneven, with women experiencing worse outcomes than men. These gender disparities have reinforced and highlighted important longer-term gender-related challenges in the South Korean labor market. Despite an above-average level of female tertiary education, the gender pay gap in South Korea is at the top of the range among OECD countries. The labor force participation rate is 20 percentage points lower for women than for men, a difference that is about one-quarter larger than the average for high-income countries. These disparities--as well as fertility that is the lowest of any advanced economy country in the world--reduce South Korea's future economic prospects and will contribute to fiscal challenges as the population rapidly ages. The analysis in this paper suggests that the combination of low female employment and low fertility in South Korea reflects features of the traditional nature of work that create a particularly stark tradeoff for women between work and family and put pressure on women to choose one or the other. This tradeoff has increased in recent years because the opportunity cost of having a child has risen with the rapid growth in the tertiary education rate of South Korean women. Regressions based on individual-level data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) show that the entire gap in female labor force participation is driven by married women, particularly women with children. Unmarried women with no children are just as likely to be employed as men. A sizable "child earnings penalty" for South Korean women is fully explained by women dropping out of the labor force after the birth of their first child rather than reducing hours or hourly wages. Although South Korea has made strides toward making work more family friendly, there is scope to do better. |
| Keywords: | Gender labor market disparities, labor force participation, fertility, South Korea |
| JEL: | J11 J18 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2022–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iie:wpaper:wp22-11&r= |
| By: | Philipp, Julia |
| Abstract: | In this paper, I study the role of gender-typical parental occupation for young adults’ gender-typical university major choice using data on a recent cohort of university students in Germany. Results show significant intergenerational associations between the gender typicality in parental occupation and young adults’ majors. As to why these effects occur, findings suggest that the transfer of occupation-specific resources from parents to their children plays an important role and that a transmission of gender roles explains at least some of the father-son associations. The paper contributes to existing literature by introducing a novel measure that operationalises the extent to which majors and occupations are ‘typically female’ or ‘typically male’ and by studying different transmission channels. |
| Keywords: | gender norms; gender roles; university major choice; intergenerational transmission; Springer deal |
| JEL: | I23 J16 J24 Z13 |
| Date: | 2022–06–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:115195&r= |
| By: | Seth Murray; Danielle H. Sandler; Matthew Staiger |
| Abstract: | Childbirth and subsequent breaks from the labor market are a primary reason why the average earnings of women is lower than that of men. This paper uses linked survey and administrative data from the United States to investigate whether the sex composition of executives at the firm, defined as the top earners, affects the earnings and employment outcomes of new mothers. We begin by documenting that (i) the male-female earnings gap is smaller in industries in which a larger share of executives are women, and (ii) the male-female earnings gap has declined more in industries that have experienced larger increases in the share of executives who are female. Despite these cross-sectional and longitudinal correlations, we find no evidence that the sex composition of the executives at the firm has a causal effect on the childbirth and motherhood penalties that impact women's earnings and employment. |
| Keywords: | motherhood penalty, male-female pay gap |
| JEL: | J16 M50 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:21-03&r= |
| By: | Robertson, Raymond (Texas A&M University); Kokas, Deeksha (World Bank); Cardozo Medeiros, Diego (University of Chicago); Lopez-Acevedo, Gladys (World Bank) |
| Abstract: | Are the wage gains from exports specific to exporting industries, or do they dissipate throughout the economy? In the language of trade theory, are the benefits from exporting industry specific or factor specific? To analyze this question, we study the case of Bangladesh. Bangladesh was the 4th largest apparel supplier to the United States market in 2020. Recent studies show the positive impact of apparel exports on female labor force participation in the formal labor market and a range of household decisions. We extend this literature by estimating the relationship between apparel exports and the male-female wage gap surrounding an exogenous policy change in the European Union that corresponded to a discrete increase in apparel-export unit values. We find that the increase in prices is associated with increases in women's wages that go beyond the apparel sector. The economy-wide male-female wage gap for less-educated workers in Bangladesh dropped by more than half with the increase in apparel export prices, consistent with trade theory, and that the change estimated with a cross-section IV approach matches simulation results of a simple heterogenous firm comparative advantage (HFCA) model. Our findings are not driven by either changing minimum wage levels (that are not binding for apparel in Bangladesh) or other changes through time, and are robust to incorporating input-output table data to account for the contributions of non-traded industries to export markets. |
| Keywords: | Bangladesh, apparel, exports, male-female wage inequality, rules of origin |
| JEL: | F13 F14 F15 F16 J23 J31 O15 O19 |
| Date: | 2022–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15411&r= |
| By: | Pauline Charousset (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Marion Monnet (INED - Institut national d'études démographiques) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how student gender influences the feedback given by teachers, and how this affects the student's performance in school. Using the written feedback provided to the universe of French high school students by their math teachers over a five-year period, we show that teachers use different words to assess the performance of equally able male and female students. Teachers highlight the positive behavior and encourage the efforts of their female students while, for similarly-performing males, they criticize the students for unruly behavior and praise them for their intellectual skills. To understand how this relates to the student's subsequent educational outcomes, we then match these data to records from French national examinations, as well as these students' higher education application behavior and ultimate institution of enrollment. Using the quasi-random allocation of teachers to classes, we estimate that being assigned to a teacher with feedback that is one standard deviation more gendered improves student math performance by 1.6 percent of a standard deviation on average, but does not affect students' enrollment in higher education in the following year. |
| Keywords: | teacher feedback,text mining,gender,student performance,higher education |
| Date: | 2022–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-03733956&r= |
| By: | Sabrina Di Addario (Bank of Italy); Patrick Kline (University of California, Berkeley); Raffaele Saggio (University of British Columbia, Canada); Mikkel Soelvsten (University of Wisconsin, Madison) |
| Abstract: | Sequential auction models of labour market competition predict that the wages required to successfully poach a worker from a rival employer will depend on the productivities of both the poached and the poaching firms. We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd et al. (1999) in which log hiring wages include a worker fixed effect, a fixed effect for the ‘destination’ firm hiring the worker, and a fixed effect for the ‘origin’ firm, or labour market state, from which the worker was hired. Fitting the model to Italian social security records, origin effects only explain 0.7 per cent of the variance of hiring wages, while destination effects explain about 23 per cent of the variance. Studying a cohort of workers entering the Italian labour market in 2005, we find that differences in origin effects yield essentially no contribution to the evolution of the gender gap in hiring wages, while differences in destination effects explain the majority of the gap at the time of labour market entry. These results suggest that where a worker is hired from tends to be relatively inconsequential for their wages in comparison to where they are currently employed. |
| Keywords: | hiring wages, sequential auctions, firm effects, bargaining, gender wage gap |
| JEL: | J31 D22 |
| Date: | 2022–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1374_22&r= |
| By: | Sonja Radas (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb); Bruno Skrinjaric (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb) |
| Abstract: | Studies show that women are very productive employees, but that as business owners, compared to their male counterparts, they run companies that earn less, grow at a lesser rate, and employ a smaller number of employees. One of the explanations for this discrepancy argues that indicators such as sales, turnover or profit do not measure performance adequately because they are dependent on the size of the firm. Since women often make a conscious decision to keep their companies small, these performance measures may not adequately represent women-owned businesses. We study a panel of micro firms across all industries, from three EU countries of comparable size (Croatia, Slovenia, and Slovakia) in the period 2010 – 2019. Results indicate that female-owned firms have higher values of both turnover per asset and value added per asset. Additionally, results suggest that during recession years, female-led firms show a degree of resilience to these adverse effects, and they manage to increase their turnover per asset by 3 to 4 percent on average, compared to male-led firms. We conclude that although women-owned micro firms tend to have less resources compared to men’s, women can create larger output per asset, suggesting capability to combine those resources in a very effective way. |
| Keywords: | women entrepreneurship; firm performance; effectuation effect; recession |
| JEL: | B54 J16 L26 |
| Date: | 2022–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iez:wpaper:2203&r= |
| By: | Ingrid Haegele |
| Abstract: | Most organizations rely on managers to identify talented workers for promotions. However, managers who are evaluated on team performance have an incentive to hoard workers. This study provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding using novel personnel records from a large manufacturing firm. Temporary reductions of talent hoarding increase workers' applications for promotions by 123%. By reducing the quality and performance of promoted workers, talent hoarding contributes to misallocation of talent and perpetuates gender inequality in representation and pay at the firm. |
| Date: | 2022–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2206.15098&r= |