Rethinking Gender Centres in Nigerian Universities
Autor/in:
Igiebor, Oluwakemi Temitope
Quelle: jgcs (Journal of Gender, Culture and Society), 2 (2022) 2, S 11–19
Inhalt: For the past three decades, discussions centred on gender equity have become buzzwords in academic institutions in Nigeria, which has led to an increasing effort to establish gender centres and adopt equity policies. Despite the awareness and presence of gender centres in Nigerian universities, institutionalising gender equity has been challenging. There is a struggle to explain how policy absence and gender centre mergers may constrain positive institutional gender change. This article explores why academic institutions have established gender centres but have not created gender policies. Taking into account the gender stakeholder’s perspectives in two purposively selected universities in Nigeria, this study utilises an integrated feminist approach to investigate why university gender centres are unable to advance gender equity within the institutions. Concepts like institutional resistance and layering offered tools that helped capture the dynamics of institutional change and stasis in the case studies. Findings showed that the existence of gender centres without formalised policies is a window-dressing approach that limits the potential for gender equity within the universities. It also revealed how the redirection of gender centres through mergers with other centres is ‘gendered’. Evidence showed that the prospect for institutional gender change is often tempered by merging incompatible and non-complementary centres. This study, thus, adds to the scholarly literature on institutional resistance, providing valuable insights into the subtle manifestations of resistance towards gender equity institutionalisation in academia.
Quelle: International journal of environmental research and public health, 19 (2022) 12
Inhalt: Current trends in quantitative health research have highlighted the inadequacy of the usual operationalisation of sex and gender, resulting in a growing demand for more nuanced options. This scoping review provides an overview of recent instruments for the operationalisation of sex and gender in health-related research beyond a concept of mutually exclusive binary categories as male or masculine vs. female or feminine. Our search in three databases (Medline, Scopus and Web of Science) returned 9935 matches, of which 170 were included. From these, we identified 77 different instruments. The number and variety of instruments measuring sex and/or gender in quantitative health-related research increased over time. Most of these instruments were developed with a US-American student population. The majority of instruments focused on the assessment of gender based on a binary understanding, while sex or combinations of sex and gender were less frequently measured. Different populations may require the application of different instruments, and various research questions may ask for different dimensions of sex and gender to be studied. Despite the clear interest in the development of novel sex and/or gender instruments, future research needs to focus on new ways of operationalisation that account for their variability and multiple dimensions.
Schlagwörter:Fragebogen; Gender; Geschlechterbegriff; Geschlechtervielfalt; Gesundheitsforschung; intersectionality; Item; literature review; quantitative Forschung; sex
CEWS Kategorie:Diversity, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung
Gender-Specific Application Behavior, Matching, and the Residual Gender Earnings Gap
Autor/in:
Lochner, Benjamin; Merkl, Christian
Quelle: IAB-Discussion Paper (IAB-Discussion Paper: Beiträge zum wissenschaftlichen Dialog aus dem Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung), 22 (2022)
Inhalt: This paper opens up the black box of gender-specific application and hiring behavior and its implications for the residual gender earnings gap. To understand the underlying mechanisms, we propose a two-stage matching model with testable implications. Using the German IAB Job Vacancy Survey, we show that the patterns in the data are in line with linear and nonlinear production functions at different jobs. Women's application probability at high-wage firms is much lower than at low-wage firms. By contrast, women have the same probability of being hired as men when they apply at high-wage firms. These patterns are not in line with taste-based discrimination, but they can be rationalized by high-wage firms that ask for more employer-sided flexibility. We show that the share of male applicants increases in various dimensions of employer-sided flexibility requirements. Adding the share of male applicants as a proxy for flexibility requirements to Mincer wage regressions reduces the residual earnings gap by around 50 to 60 percent. Women who match at jobs with a high share of male applicants earn substantially more than women at comparable jobs with only females in the application pool (due to compensating differentials). By contrast, when women with children match at these jobs, they face large earnings discounts relative to men.
Schlagwörter:application; application behavior; Gender Studies; Geschlechterforschung; Hiring Decision; work
CEWS Kategorie:Arbeitswelt und Arbeitsmarkt, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung
Inhalt: To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by women’s lower work experience and intensive margin of labor supply. Based on a dynamic microsimulation model, we then estimate how gender differences accumulate over work lives to account for the biographical dimension of the gender gap. We observe an average gender lifetime earnings gap of 51.5 percent for birth cohorts 1964-1972. We show that this unadjusted gender lifetime earnings gap increases strongly with the number of children, ranging from 17.8 percent for childless women to 68.0 percent for women with three or more children. However, using a counterfactual analysis we find that the adjusted gender lifetime earnings gap of 10 percent differs only slightly by women’s family background.
Free to Be Me? Evolving Gender Expression and the Dynamic Interplay between Authenticity and the Desire to Be Accepted at Work
Autor/in:
Hennekam, Sophie; Ladge, Jamie J.
Quelle: AMJ (Academy of Management Journal), (2022)
Inhalt: This study examines how the gender expression of transgender individuals evolves as they transition in the context of work. We draw from interviews with 25 transgender employees conducted at four points in time over a two-year period as they initiate, perform, and continue their gender transition. Contributing to the literature on authenticity and identity transitions, our findings challenge the assumptions that individuals know how to express an authentic self and that authenticity has an endpoint by pointing to the evolving and relational nature of authenticity that involves a trial-and-error approach in which transgender individuals learn to become authentic as they engage in various forms of gender performativity. Further, we position authenticity as a continuum, as individuals may temper their gender expression to elicit acceptance and express a gender that feels “authentic enough” as they contend with the impact of prevailing gender norms and expectations in the workplace. Finally, the findings suggest that the identity transition process evolves in a non-linear way and involves a dynamic interplay between the desire to express one’s gender in a way that feels authentic and the desire to feel accepted by others.
Schlagwörter:gender identity; non-binary; trans people
Inhalt: A question asking for respondents’ sex is one of the standard sociodemographic characteristics collected in a survey. Until now, it typically consisted of a simple question (e.g., “Are you…?”) with two answer categories (“male” and “female”). In 2019, Germany implemented the additional sex designation divers for intersex people. In survey methodology, this has led to an ongoing discussion how to include a third category in questionnaires. We investigate respondents’ understanding of the third category, and whether introducing it affects data quality. Moreover, we investigate the understanding of the German term Geschlecht for sex and gender. To answer our research questions, we implemented different question wordings asking for sex/gender in a non-probability-based online panel in Germany and combined them with open-ended questions. Findings and implications for surveys are discussed.
Can Wage Transparency Alleviate Gender Sorting in the Labor Market?
Autor/in:
Bamieh, Omar; Ziegler, Lennart
Quelle: IZA Discussion Paper, 15363 (2022)
Inhalt: Wage decompositions suggest that a large share of the gender wage gap can be explained by differences in occupation and employer choices. If female workers are not well informed about these pay differences, increasing wage transparency might alleviate the gender gap. We test this hypothesis by examining the impact of the 2011 Pay Transparency Law in Austria, which requires companies to state a wage figure in job advertisements. For the analysis, we combine vacancy postings from the largest Austrian job board with social security spells that record the gender of new hires. To compare the pay level of vacancies before and after the reform, we predict wage postings using detailed occupation-employer cells, which explain about 75 percent of the variation in posted wages. While we estimate a substantial gender wage gap of 15 log points, pay transparency did not affect gender sorting into better-paid occupation and firms. To study job transitions, we focus on a subsample of workers whose previous employment is also observed. Our estimates show that switching occupations is common, and it often entails significant wage changes. Yet, in line with our main estimates, we do not find that women become more likely to switch to better-paid jobs. We interpret the absence of effects as evidence that limited transparency does not explain the persistence of gender sorting in the labor market.
Inhalt: We study the presence and the extent of gender differences in reference letters for graduate students in economics and how these may affect the start of young researchers' careers. To these ends, we build a novel rich dataset covering ten cohorts of academic job market applicants to two top institutions hiring on the international market. We collect information from the application packages and conduct text analysis of reference letters using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in order to measure gender differences in the style and content of the letters. We then combine the resulting measures with information on the applicants’ subsequent labor market outcomes as extrapolated from the main online repositories. Our results reveal that male and female candidates receive different support from their sponsors and are described in systematically different terms. While female advisors talk more about personal characteristics, only male advisors do so at a different extent for male and female candidates. Such differences in how candidates are talked about affect subsequent career outcomes and explain a non-negligible part (5 to 8% approximately) of the observed gender gaps.
Inhalt: Women academics earn less than men, even after controlling for a range of productivity-related covariates. However, the latter usually do not include direct measures of research productivity. This paper uses data from the Higher Education Statistical Authority (HESA) confirming the existence of unconditional and conditional gender wage gaps. Data separately collected for the recent 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) shows men are more research productive but that after controlling for academic grade there is no gender productivity gap. For both wage and productivity gaps, there are barriers for women to achieve the research productivity needed to be promoted, and reducing these would go a long way to eliminating such gaps.
Harris und Maté-Sanchez-Val (2022) finden heraus, dass Frauen weniger Zugang zu Ressourcen haben um ihre Prouktivität in der Forschung zu erhöhen und sich dies negativ auf die Verringerung der Gehaltsunterschiede auswirkt.
Technological Progress, Occupational Structure and Gender Gaps in the German Labour Market
Autor/in:
Bachmann, Ronald; Gonschor, Myrielle
Quelle: IZA Discussion Paper, 15419 (2022)
Inhalt: We analyze if technological progress and the corresponding change in the occupational structure have improved the relative position of women in the labour market. We show that the share of women rises most strongly in non-routine cognitive and manual occupations, but declines in routine occupations. While the share of women also rises relatively strongly in high-paying occupations, womens' individual-level wages lag behind which implies within-occupation gender wage gaps. A decomposition exercise shows that composition effects with respect to both individual and job characteristics can explain the rise of female shares in the top tier of the labour market to an extent. However, the unexplained part of the decomposition is sizeable, indicating that developments such as technological progress are relevant