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on Gender |
| By: | Estefanía Galván (Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía); Cecilia García-Peñalosa (Aix-Marseille Université (Francia).CNRS, EHESS, AMSE, CEPR & CESifo) |
| Abstract: | Gendered norms have major implications for women’s labor market outcomes. Notably, a recent literature finds that child-rearing norms and the prescription that the husband should be the main breadwinner lead to behavioral changes affecting women's labor supply. Motherhood reduces participation and hours of market work, while women who earn more than their husbands have been shown to react in ways that reverse that gap. In this paper we use panel data for the US to examine to what extent these two different norms interact. We start by asking whether child-rearing norms affect women who are the main breadwinner and those who are not in the same way, and then turn to how mothers and childless women react when breaking the male-as-the-breadwinner norm. Our results show that the breadwinner norm has an effect only on mothers, suggesting that the salience of gender norms may depend on the household's context. Concerning child-rearing, we find that although the labor supply of women who earn more than their husbands initially responds to motherhood less than that of secondary earners, the two groups converge after 10 years. Moreover, women in the former category exhibit a disproportionately large increases in the share of housework they perform after becoming mothers. These results indicate that norms still prevail over considerations of comparative advantage, and that the presence of children pushes women to seek to compensate breaking a norm by adhering to another one. |
| Keywords: | gender identity norms, female labor supply, motherhood, relative income |
| JEL: | D10 J16 J22 |
| Date: | 2021–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-15-21&r= |
| By: | Julieta Peveri (Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France.); Marc Sangnier (University of Namur & Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France.) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies differences across genders in the re-contesting decisions of politicians following electoral wins or defeats. Using close races in mixed-gender French local elections, we show that women are less likely to persist in competition when they lose compared to male runners-up, but are equally or more prone than male winners to re-contest when they win. Differences in observable characteristics or in the expected electoral returns of running again cannot fully account for these gender gaps in persistence. In contrast, the heterogeneity of the results across political ideology, age, experience and occupation suggests that behavioural explanations are at play. Additionally, we provide evidence that a woman's victory encourages former female challengers to re-contest but does not trigger the entry of new female candidates. |
| Keywords: | gender, competition, persistence, candidates, self-selection, elections |
| JEL: | D72 J24 |
| Date: | 2021–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aim:wpaimx:2139&r= |
| By: | Hannah Illing; Johannes F. Schmieder; Simon Trenkle |
| Abstract: | Existing research has shown that job displacement leads to large and persistent earnings losses for men, but evidence for women is scarce. Using administrative data from Germany, we apply an event study design in combination with propensity score matching and a reweighting technique to directly compare men and women who are displaced from similar jobs and firms. Our results show that after a mass layoff, women’s earnings losses are about 35% higher than men’s, with the gap persisting five years after job displacement. This is partly explained by a higher propensity of women to take up part-time or marginal employment following job loss, but even full-time wage losses are almost 50% (or 5 percentage points) higher for women than for men. We then show that on the household level there is no evidence of an added worker effect, independent of the gender of the job loser. Finally, we document that parenthood magnifies the gender gap sharply: while fathers of young children have smaller earnings losses than men in general, mothers of young children have much larger earnings losses than other women. |
| JEL: | J0 J16 J3 J63 J64 J65 |
| Date: | 2021–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29251&r= |
| By: | Verónica Amarante (Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía); Cecilia Rossel (Universidad Católica del Uruguay. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales.) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the intrahousehold allocation of housework and paid work in five Latin American countries. The study of intrahousehold decisions in a region where gender inequality is higher than in the developed world and where a high proportion of women are excluded from paid work is important to disentangle how existing theories for the developed world apply to more unequal contexts. We carry out OLS regressions using harmonized time-use surveys for Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay to consider the relationship between earnings and housework, in the framework of the dependency, gender deviance neutralization, and autonomy hypothesis. We find that in Latin America, female housework decisions are better associated with women´s absolute earnings. The econometric evidence compatible with the dependence hypothesis, or even with compensatory gender display for some countries, tends to disappear when absolute earnings are considered to understand women’s time devoted to household work. The significance that women´s monetary resources have in shaping intra-household decisions in Latin America offers new evidence to incorporate into policy design, highlighting the crucial links between labor market performance and intrahousehold gender equity in the region. |
| Keywords: | unpaid family work; Time use; Housework/division of labor, Latin America |
| JEL: | C81 D13 C83 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-08-21&r= |
| By: | Kamal, Mustafa (Tasmanian School of Business & Economics, University of Tasmania); Blacklow, Paul (Tasmanian School of Business & Economics, University of Tasmania) |
| Abstract: | This paper simultaneously examines the effects of age, period and birth cohort on the evolution of the Australian gender wage gap from 2001-18. It employs the proxy variable approach within the Mincerian earnings function to overcome the Age-Period-Cohort (APC) identification problem while also controlling for employment selection and individual human capital accumulation. The paper corroborates previous evidence of a widening gender wage gap with age. It also provides new evidence of period effects suppressing female wage rates compared to male rates. However, as opposed to expectations, the study finds no significant influence of birth cohort effects on the Australian gender wage gap. The results also suggest that the failure to control for period effects can lead to significant cohort effects or substantial overestimation of age or cohort effects on wages. The findings of the paper have implications for a range of studies that employ Mincer-type earnings functions in addition to policy implications. |
| Keywords: | gender, wage gap, age, period, cohort, Australia |
| JEL: | C33 J16 J31 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tas:wpaper:37327&r= |
| By: | Estefanía Galván (Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía) |
| Abstract: | Studies for high-income countries have shown that the prescription that a man should earn more than his wife holds back women’s performance in the labour market, evidencing the importance of gender identity norms in explaining persistent gender gaps. Using data on couples in Uruguay for the period 1986-2016, this paper analyses behavioural responses to the male breadwinner norm, investigating the role of job informality as an additional mechanism of response to gender norms. My results show that the higher the probability that the wife earns more than her husband, the less likely she is to engage in a formal job, providing evidence that gender norms affect not only the quantity of labour supply (i.e. labour force participation and hours of work), but also the quality of jobs in which women are employed. Moreover, I also identify meaningful effects of the norm on men: those with lower potential earnings than their wives react to the norm by self-selecting into better-paid formal jobs. Not considering these effects would lead to underestimate the consequences of gender norms on labour market inequalities in the context of developing countries. |
| Keywords: | gender identity, social norms, informality, labour supply, housework. |
| JEL: | D13 J16 J22 |
| Date: | 2021–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-14-21&r= |
| By: | Deepak Malghan; Hema Swaminathan |
| Abstract: | Di?erences in economic outcomes between men and women within a household, or intra-household gender inequality has su?ered from relative neglect despite a renewed focus on gender inequality. Using global micro-data from nearly three million house-holds, we present evidence that this neglect renders our understanding of the relation-ship between gender inequality and economic development analytically and empirically incomplete. We show that intra-household gender inequality in earnings is persistent across the income distribution, across a wide range to countries, and over four-decades. For a sub-sample of countries, we show that the relationship between intra-household gender inequality and household economic status is non-monotonic – that we refer to as the “micro-Kuznets” relationship. We also develop an empirical framework to mea-sure the aggregate welfare loss from intra-household gender inequality. For a range of plausible inequality aversion assumptions, we report an median welfare loss of over 15% of aggregate earnings. |
| JEL: | D63 I31 J16 D10 |
| Date: | 2021–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:lwswps:34&r= |