Salary transparency and gender pay inequality: Evidence from Canadian universities
Autor/in:
Lyons, Elizabeth; Zhang, Laurina
Quelle: Strategic Management Journal, (2023)
Inhalt: We examine whether salary transparency influences gender pays inequality in the context of Canadian universities by exploiting a policy change enacted in one Canadian province that required salary disclosure through a publicly searchable database, thus lowering the cost of monitoring the gender pay gap.
We find that, on average, salary disclosure improves gender pay equality but institutions respond in different ways. Despite little media attention around gender equality at the time of the policy, institutions most likely to anticipate higher scrutiny, such as top ranked institutions, respond more aggressively to improve gender pay equality-both in terms of the magnitude and type of response. Combined, our findings suggest that the extent of change from salary transparency depends on the reduction in monitoring costs and organizational characteristics.Managerial Abstract: Salary transparency has been implemented in various ways around the world as a strategy by firms and policy makers to reduce the gender pay gap. However, whether and how it can achieve this in practice is unclear. We examine a salary transparency policy that mandated disclosure to the public through an online database in one Canadian province by comparing the change in gender pay inequality in that province relative to the change in the gender pay gap in provinces without disclosure. We find that salary transparency improves average gender pay equality primarily within the most visible organizations that likely anticipate high levels of public scrutiny. Our findings imply that facilitating low-cost public monitoring of gender inequalities can motivate organizations to enact change.
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.
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
„Evaluative Diskriminierung“: Arbeitsbewertung als blinder Fleck in der Analyse des Gender Pay Gaps
Autor/in:
Klammer, Ute; Klenner, Christina; Lillemeier, Sarah; Heilmann, Tom
Quelle: KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 74 (2022) 2, S 233–258
Inhalt: Frauen verdienen in Deutschland durchschnittlich 18 % weniger pro Stunde als Männer. Vertikale und horizontale Segregationslinien, Unterschiede im Beschäftigungsumfang sowie in den Erwerbsverläufen von Frauen und Männern sind als Erklärungsfaktoren dafür statistisch identifiziert worden. Bislang ist jedoch unklar, welche Bedeutung die Arbeitsbewertung für den Gender Pay Gap hat und welche Rolle evaluative Diskriminierungen in der Verdienststruktur spielen. Die in diesem Artikel vorgestellten Analysen bieten erstmals eine statistische Grundlage zur Überprüfung der Annahmen der Devaluationshypothese. Danach wird angenommen, dass die beruflichen Anforderungen und Belastungen von Frauen geringer bewertet und somit auch geringer entlohnt werden als die von Männern und somit eine geschlechterdifferente Arbeitsbewertung den Gender Pay Gap mitverursacht. Die dargestellten statistischen Ergebnisse belegen unter Anwendung des neu entwickelten Comparable Worth Index die Relevanz solcher evaluativen Diskriminierungen und zeigen, dass die geringere Bewertung und Bezahlung weiblicher gegenüber männlicher Erwerbsarbeit auch unter Kontrolle weiterer verdienstrelevanter Faktoren zentral zum Gender Pay Gap beitragen.
Gender Differences in STEM Persistence after Graduation
Autor/in:
Delaney, Judith; Devereux, Paul J.
Quelle: economica, 89 (2022) 356, S 862–883
Inhalt: Much attention is focused on finding ways to encourage females to study STEM in school and college but what actually happens once women complete a STEM degree? We use the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey to trace out gender differences in STEM persistence over the career. We find a continuous process whereby women are more likely to exit STEM than men. Among holders of STEM undergraduate degrees, women are more likely to obtain a non- STEM master's degree. Then, after entering the labour market, there is a gradual outflow of females during the first 15 years post-graduation so that females are about 20 percentage points less likely to work in STEM compared to their male counterparts. Conditional on leaving STEM, we find that females are more likely to enter the education and health sectors while males are more likely to enter the more lucrative business sector and that this can partly explain the gender pay gap for STEM graduates. Overall, our results suggest that policies that aim to increase the proportion of females studying STEM in school and college may have less effect than expected due to the lower attachment of females to STEM after graduation. Such policies may need to be augmented with efforts to tackle the greater propensity of females to exit STEM throughout the career.
CEWS Kategorie:Arbeitswelt und Arbeitsmarkt, Naturwissenschaft und Technik, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Geschlechterverhältnis
Dokumenttyp:Zeitschriftenaufsatz
Setting adequate wages for workers: Managers' work experience, incentive scheme and gender matter
Autor/in:
Huber, David; Kühl, Leonie; Szech, Nora
Quelle: PLOS ONE (PLOS ONE), 17 (2022) 8
Inhalt: Many societies report an increasingly divergent development of managers' salaries compared to that of their workforce. Moreover, there is often a lack in diversity amongst managerial boards. We investigate the role of managers' gender and incentive scheme on wages chosen for workers by conducting two experimental studies. The data reveal male managers respond in more self-oriented ways to their incentive scheme. Further, we find that experience with the workers' task can increase appreciation of workers. Effects are strongest when the managers' compensation scheme rules out self-orientation. Overall, female managers display more consistency in choosing adequate wages for workers, i.e. their choices are less affected by incentives. An increase in diversity may thus help reducing salary disparities and foster work atmosphere.