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.
An examination of gender difference in advancement and salary for Marriage and Family Therapy faculty members working in public universities
Autor/in:
Edwards, Lindsay L.; Leone, Rosemary A.; Culver, Kevin
Quelle: Journal of marital and family therapy, 49 (2023) 1, S 74–91
Inhalt: Evidence for inequitable advancement and salary disparity for women in academia is compelling, but only a marginal amount of research has explored this in the field of Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) specifically. Current research provides preliminary evidence that women remain underrepresented at the Full Professor rank and are paid less than men MFT faculty. This study collected publicly available data for MFT faculty in public universities to explore gender differences in advancement between ranks, salary disparity, and the representation of women and men in the highest and lowest paying niches of MFT academia. Results showed that, despite being 60.15% of MFTs in public universities, women were paid an average of $5596.25 less than men. Men were 1.40 times more likely than women to be promoted to Full Professor on time-within 13 years of their terminal degree. Implications for addressing inequitable advancement and salary disparity for women MFT faculty are discussed.
Schlagwörter:academic rank; akademische Laufbahnentwicklung; female discipline; full professor; gender pay gap; public universities and colleges; wage gap
CEWS Kategorie:Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Geschlechterverhältnis
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
COVID-19 and the Gender Gap in University Student Performance
Autor/in:
Bratti, Massimiliano; Lippo, Enrico
Quelle: IZA Discussion Paper, (2022)
Inhalt: The gendered impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been observed in many domains, such as labor market outcomes and mental health. One sector that was particularly disrupted by the pandemic was education, owing to the need to close educational institutions and move all learning activities online. In this paper, we investigate the gender gap in university student performance, focusing on a large public university located in one of the European regions most affected by the first pandemic wave (Lombardy, in Northern Italy). Despite concerns that the pandemic might have had a heavier toll on the educational performance of female students, our empirical analysis shows that the gender gap in student progression (number of credits earned) was not affected by the pandemic and that in some college majors (social sciences and humanities) women even improved their GPA relative to men
Schlagwörter:Benotung; gender gap; Leistungsdifferenzen; Leistungsfähigkeit; public universities and colleges; student; Student*in; Universität
CEWS Kategorie:Hochschulen, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Studium und Studierende, Geschlechterverhältnis
Quelle: Sex Roles (Sex Roles), 86 (2022) 9-10, S 544–558
Inhalt: Academic studies of gender pay gaps within higher education institutions have consistently found pay differences. However, theory on how organisation-level factors contribute to pay gaps is underdeveloped. Using a framework of relational inequalities and advanced quantitative analysis, this paper makes a case that gender pay gaps are based on organisation-level interpretations and associated management practices to reward 'merit' that perpetuate inequalities
Payroll data of academic staff within two UK Russell Group universities (N = 1,998 and 1,789) with seeming best-practice formal pay systems are analysed to determine causes of gender pay gaps. We find marked similarities between universities. Most of the variability is attributed to factors of job segregation and human capital, however we also delineate a set of demographic characteristics that, when combined, are highly rewarded without explanation. Based on our analysis of the recognition of 'merit,' we extend theoretical explanations of gender pay gap causes to incorporate organisation-level practices.
Schlagwörter:gender pay gap; Großbritannien; higher education institution; human capital; Humankapital; Segregation; UK; wage gap
CEWS Kategorie:Hochschulen, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Geschlechterverhältnis
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.
