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on Gender |
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Issue of 2024–12–09
eight papers chosen by Jan Sauermann, Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | von Essen, Emma (Uppsala University); Smith, Nina (Aarhus University) |
| Abstract: | The paper explores the impact of the gender composition of Boards of Directors on gender diversity and earnings gaps among executive management using administrative data on all Danish private sector firms from 1995 to 2018. We find that it is not the quantity of women directors but the quality of the women entering the board that matters in generating positive spillovers on the gender gaps within the firms. Quality is viewed as the power, conceptualized as the possible influence in the boardroom, and operationalized as the position and board experience of the directors. A way of channeling power is also through the director's networks. Powerful women directors increase spillovers, while male directors have a negative impact. However, male directors' connections to females positively decrease the gender gaps. Interestingly, the spillovers are not large enough to generate a sustained change in the gender composition of the executive board, mainly because women executives exit to a larger extent than men. |
| Keywords: | board of directors, gender diversity, spillover effects |
| JEL: | J16 M12 M51 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17401 |
| By: | Carlos F. Avenancio-León; Alessio Piccolo; Leslie Sheng Shen |
| Abstract: | After the gender pay gap narrows, what labor choices do men and women make? Several factors contribute to the persistence of the pay gap, such as workplace flexibility, systemic discrimination, and career costs of family. We show that how the labor market responds to the narrowing of the gap is just as pivotal for understanding this persistence. When the gender pay gap declines in a specific sector, women are relatively more likely to seek jobs in that sector, while men readjust their search to less equitable sectors. These compositional effects decrease female participation in less equitable sectors, which typically offer higher wages, reinforcing gender stereotypes and social norms that contribute to the glass ceiling. Through these effects, the same forces that reduce the gender pay gap at the bottom of the pay distribution also contribute to the persistence of gender inequities at the top. This self-reinforcing cycle underscores the need for reforms that are cross-sectoral and comprehensive to effectively achieve meaningful reductions in gender inequities across the labor market. |
| Keywords: | gender pay gap; bank deregulation |
| JEL: | J16 J71 O16 |
| Date: | 2024–11–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedbwp:99067 |
| By: | Campa, Pamela (Stockholm School of Economics); Saygin, Perihan (Autonomous University of Barcelona); Tumen, Semih (Amazon) |
| Abstract: | How can women's representation improve in countries that do not embrace legislated gender quotas? We study municipal elections in Turkey during 2009-2019. A conservative dominant party, Erdogan's AKP, is often challenged by a Kurdish party that promotes gender equality in electoral lists. Exploiting within-municipality variation, we find that the Kurdish party winning leads AKP to increase its share of female candidates by 25 to 30% in the next election. Other opposition parties winning has a substantially lower impact. Our results suggest that one party empowering women can help reducing gender gaps in lists across-the-board. |
| Keywords: | women political representation, electoral competition |
| JEL: | D72 J16 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17386 |
| By: | Banerjee, Rakesh (University of Exeter); Bharati, Tushar (University of Western Australia Business School); Fakir, Adnan (University of Sussex); Qian, Yiwei (Southwestern University of Finance and Economics); Sunder, Naveen (Bentley University) |
| Abstract: | We conduct an experiment on a major international online freelancing labor market platform to study the impact of greater flexibility in choosing work hours within a day on female participation. We post identical job advertisements (for 320 jobs) covering a wide range of tasks (80 distinct tasks) that differ only in flexibility and the wage offered. Comparing the numbers of applicants for these jobs, we find that while both men and women prefer flexibility, the elasticity of response for women is twice that for the men. Flexible jobs receive 24 percent more female applications and 12 percent more male applications compared to inflexible jobs. Critically, these changes come at no cost to the quality of applications. In fact, we find suggestive evidence that flexible jobs attract higher quality female candidates. Our findings have important implications for explaining gender differences in labor market outcomes and for equity initiatives in firms. |
| Keywords: | workplace flexibility, online freelancing jobs, female labor force participation |
| JEL: | J22 O14 J16 L86 |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17434 |
| By: | Haddad, Joanne; Kattan, Lamis |
| Abstract: | By the end of the nineteenth century, labor legislation for women had become a prominent issue in the United States, with most states enacting at least one female-specific work regulation. We examine the impact of three previously unexplored legislation: seating, health and safety, and night-work regulations. Given that not all states adopted these laws, and the staggered nature of adoption, we rely on a difference-in-differences strategy design to estimate the effects on female gainful employment. Our findings indicate that laws regulating health and safety conditions and restricting women's night work increased the likelihood of female employment by about 4% to 8%, accounting for about 10% to 20% from the total increase during our period of analysis. Examining heterogeneous effects reveals that younger and married women without children witnessed the largest increase in the likelihood of employment. We also document that native, higher-class and literate women were also incentivized to join the workforce. Women's labor supply in the decades under consideration has been estimated to be quite inelastic with respect to own wage. Nevertheless, we find sizable labor force participation responses to the female-specific labor regulation we study. This indicates that the legislation must have shifted women's labor supply curves, either because it made jobs more pleasant, or because it improved perceptions about how respectable it is for a woman to work in the labor market. Both channels would reduce disutility from work, and increase labor supply at any given wage level. Our findings hold important implications for policymakers and advocates seeking to promote gender equality in the labor market. |
| Keywords: | Labor Supply, Labor Law, Gender Law, Gender Norms |
| JEL: | J08 J16 J21 J24 J78 K31 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1518 |
| By: | Hugo Sant'Anna |
| Abstract: | In this paper, I introduce a novel decomposition method based on Gaussian mixtures and k-Means clustering, applied to a large Brazilian administrative dataset, to analyze the gender wage gap through the lens of worker-firm interactions shaped by comparative advantage. These interactions generate wage levels in logs that exceed the simple sum of worker and firm components, making them challenging for traditional linear models to capture effectively. I find that these ``complementarity effects'' account for approximately 17% of the gender wage gap. Larger firms, high human capital, STEM degrees, and managerial roles are closely related to it. For instance, among managerial occupations, the match effect goes as high as one-third of the total gap. I also find women are less likely to be employed by firms offering higher returns to both human capital and firm-specific premiums, resulting in a significantly larger firm contribution to the gender wage gap than previously estimated. Combined, these factors explain nearly half of the overall gender wage gap, suggesting the importance of understanding firm-worker matches in addressing gender-based pay disparities. |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2411.03209 |
| By: | Rosa Weber; Camilla Härtull; Jan Saarela |
| Abstract: | Although research in the STEM field has extensively examined its gendered characteristics, the vast majority of the literature has concentrated on educational transitions and young adults. More limited attention has been devoted to the longer-term work-family trajectories of STEM majors, and how these are linked to gender earnings gaps. In response, we exploit Finnish register data to identify the most common work-family trajectories followed by college educated men and women with STEM majors in ages 30–40 (N=150, 796). Given marked differences in gender proportions across STEM fields, we distinguish computer science and engineering majors from natural science majors. In a second step, we assess gender differences in the returns to distinct work-family trajectories and within-gender differences. We report three main findings. First, women are able to combine a career in computer science and engineering and having children. Second, across occupations, mothers earn considerably less than fathers. This suggests that even though women can combine work and family, they do not benefit in terms of earnings. Third, beyond uncovering gender gaps, we show that a major mechanism underlying parental gender gaps is that men receive notable fatherhood premiums across work trajectories. For women, findings reveal more heterogeneous patterns. Among computer science and engineering majors, women have similar earnings across trajectories. Conversely, women with natural science majors gain from working in computer science and engineering. |
| Keywords: | Computer science and engineering, Gender, Sequence analysis, Social stratification, STEM, Occupational life, Family life, Sex discrimination, Parenthood, Careers, Sex differentials, Life course, Finland, FINLANDE / FINLAND, VIE PROFESSIONNELLE / OCCUPATIONAL LIFE, VIE FAMILIALE / FAMILY LIFE, ENSEIGNEMENT SUPERIEUR / HIGHER EDUCATION, DISCRIMINATION ENTRE SEXES / SEX DISCRIMINATION, INFORMATIQUE / COMPUTER SCIENCE, SCIENCES NATURELLES / NATURAL SCIENCES, GENRE / GENDER, DIPLOME / DIPLOMAS, PARENTALITE / PARENTHOOD, CARRIERE / CAREERS, PARCOURS DE VIE / LIFE COURSE, DIFFERENCE ENTRE SEXES / SEX DIFFERENTIALS |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idg:wpaper:3weaqjmbmewvndemrt6i |
| By: | Cullen, Claire; Sarthak, Josh (University of Warwick); Vecci, Joseph (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Talbot-Jones, Julia (School of Government, Te HerengaWaka - Victoria University ofWellington,) |
| Abstract: | Public spending on gender equality and women’s empowerment is rising rapidly in many countries. However, the unintended consequences of women’s empowerment is rarely measured and remains poorly understood. We study the impact of female empowerment programs on male backlash through a series of experiments involving 1, 007 households in rural India. The paper has four key parts. First, we use an experiment to measure backlash, observing men’s decisions to financially penalize women who participated in empowerment programs.We find that men pay to punish empowered women at double the rate of women in an otherwise identical control group (17 percent versus 8 percent). We also show that men engaging in backlash tend to hold more conservative gender attitudes and are more likely to accept or commit intimate partner violence. Second, we test multiple theories on the conditions that trigger backlash and find that backlash occurs regardless of how women become empowered. Third, we examine social image concerns as a potential behavioral mechanism and find that 18 percent of men are willing to pay to conceal their household’s involvement in empowerment programs. Those who choose to conceal are more likely to engage in backlash, suggesting that reputational concerns play a key role in driving this behavior. Finally, we test several policies to reduce backlash and find that reframing empowerment programs to emphasize broader community benefits can help mitigate backlash. |
| Keywords: | Male Backlash; Female Empowerment; Social Image; Norms; Experiments |
| JEL: | C93 J12 J16 O12 |
| Date: | 2024–11–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0849 |