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on Gender |
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Issue of 2023‒12‒04
three papers chosen by Jan Sauermann, Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | Christophe André; Orsetta Causa; Emilia Soldani; Douglas Sutherland; Filiz Unsal |
| Abstract: | Women’s employment rates and wages are still lagging those of men across OECD countries, with average employment and wage gaps now around 15% and 12% respectively. Gaps narrowed at a relatively modest pace over the past decade, calling for further policy action. A lack of affordable high-quality childcare is often an obstacle to women’s participation in the labour market and notably to working full time. A very unequal sharing of parental leave between parents and challenges upon return to work further hampers women’s careers. Biases in the tax system may discourage women from working in some countries. Women face disadvantage in accessing management positions and entrepreneurship. A range of policies can help reduce gender gaps, including better childcare provision, incentivising parents to better share parental leave, re-skilling and upskilling on return from parental leave, encouraging gender equality within firms, integration programmes for foreign-born women, promoting women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, and levelling taxation for second earners. Moreover, the multiple dimensions and root causes of gender inequality call for mainstreaming gender across policy domains. |
| Keywords: | Childcare, Economics of Gender, Education, Entrepreneurship, Financial inclusion, Gender equality, Immigration, Inequality, Labour discrimination, Parental leave, Taxation, Training |
| JEL: | D63 H24 I24 J13 J15 J16 J71 J78 L26 M53 |
| Date: | 2023–11–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1776-en&r=gen |
| By: | Kaiser, Ulrich (University of Zurich); Grimpe, Christoph (Copenhagen Business School); Sofka, Wolfgang (Copenhagen Business School) |
| Abstract: | Wage discrimination against women remains a major obstacle to fair economic opportunities for women and a grand challenge constraining economic growth in many countries. Existing research is ambivalent about whether foreign MNC subsidiaries as employers of women offer a solution to this grand challenge. On the one hand, foreign MNC subsidiaries can pay higher wages to women because they are outsiders to the host country and can deviate from social norms that disadvantage women. On the other hand, they suffer from the liabilities of foreignness that limit their attractiveness as employers for women relative to domestic firms. We theorize that the latter factor becomes less important as the level of wage discrimination against women by domestic employers increases, so that foreign MNC subsidiaries become more attractive employers when women change jobs. We isolate two boundary conditions for this effect based on (a) whether women can observe wage premiums at foreign MNC subsidiaries in local labor markets and (b) when foreign MNC subsidiaries deviate from social norms in the labor market by relying more on female top managers than domestic employers. We test and support these hypotheses for 123, 343 female professionals/managers who changed jobs in Denmark between 2000 and 2016. |
| Keywords: | gender pay gap, female employee mobility, MNC wages, employer attractiveness |
| JEL: | J5 J16 |
| Date: | 2023–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16580&r=gen |
| By: | Aristide Houndetoungan (Department of Economics, Thema, Cy Cergy Paris Université); Asad Islam (Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability (CDES) and Department of Economics, Monash University, and J-PAL); Michael Vlassopoulos (Economics Department, Social Sciences, University of Southampton, and IZA.); Yves Zenou (Department of Economics, Monash University, CEPR, and IZA) |
| Abstract: | Social networks play an important role in various aspects of life. While extensive research has explored factors such as gender, race, and education in network formation, one dimension that has received less attention is the gender of one’s child. Children tend to form friendships with same gender peers, potentially leading their parents to interact based on their child’s gender. Focusing on households with children aged 3-5, we leverage a rich dataset from rural Bangladesh to investigate the role of children’s gender in parental network formation. We estimate an equilibrium model of network formation that considers a child’s gender alongside other socioeconomic factors. Counterfactual analyses reveal that children’s gender significantly shapes parents’ network structure. Specifically, if all children share the same gender, households would have approximately 15% more links, with a stronger effect for families having girls. Importantly, the impact of children’s gender on network structure is on par with or even surpasses that of factors such as income distribution, parental occupation, education, and age. These findings carry implications for debates surrounding coed versus single-sex schools, as well as policies that foster inter-gender social interactions among children. |
| Keywords: | Social networks, early childhood, network formation, gender |
| JEL: | C57 D85 J16 O12 |
| Date: | 2023–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mos:moswps:2023-23&r=gen |