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on Gender |
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Issue of 2024‒09‒16
five papers chosen by Jan Sauermann, Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | Shuo Zhang; Peter J. Kuhn |
| Abstract: | We audit the job recommender algorithms used by four Chinese job boards by creating fictitious applicant profiles that differ only in their gender. Jobs recommended uniquely to the male and female profiles in a pair differ modestly in their observed characteristics, with female jobs advertising lower wages, requesting less experience, and coming from smaller firms. Much larger differences are observed in these ads’ language, however, with women’s jobs containing 0.58 standard deviations more stereotypically female content than men’s. Using our experimental design, we can conclude that these gender gaps are generated primarily by content-based matching algorithms that use the worker’s declared gender as a direct input. Action-based processes like item-based collaborative filtering and recruiters’ reactions to workers’ resumes contribute little to these gaps. |
| JEL: | C99 J16 J71 M50 O33 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32889 |
| By: | Lassen, Anne Sophie; Ivandić, Ria |
| Abstract: | Women continue to be underrepresented in the field of economics, especially among permanent faculty. As parenthood is an important driver of gender inequality in the labor market, we study the impact of children on the academic careers of economists. We find no evidence of delayed or reduced fertility among researchers. Event study estimates reveal that both men's and women's career trajectories are affected by parenthood and face increasing attrition from universities. Men move into the broader research sector, while women leave research completely. We also find a gender gap in the promotion to tenured faculty in the years following parenthood. |
| JEL: | A11 A20 I23 J13 J16 J44 M51 |
| Date: | 2024–05–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:124310 |
| By: | Veronika Placha (Institute of Economic Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) |
| Abstract: | This study examines gender disparities beyond pay gaps, focusing on the impact of childbirth on overall well-being. Traditional gender roles, especially in parenting, lead to unequal divisions of labor and affect both partners´ well-being, yet the shift in well-being after childbirth remains underexplored. Utilizing data from the 2013 and 2018 EU SILC surveys, the study investigates the well-being gap between mothers and fathers, revealing that childbirth significantly influences parents´ subjective well-being. Mothers tend to experience a longer-lasting positive effect, peaking during the newborn stage and gradually diminishing as children grow older, while fathers´ wellbeing boost is shorter-lived, typically fading after the child´s first year. The findings also indicate that the well-being gap between mothers and fathers has widened over time, especially during the preschool years, underscoring the complex dynamics of well-being among parents. |
| Keywords: | Subjective well-being, Gender disparities, Childbirth, Well-being gap |
| JEL: | J13 J16 I31 J12 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2024_28 |
| By: | April Burrage; Nilanjana Dasgupta; Ina Ganguli |
| Abstract: | This study examines gender differences in the social impact and commercial motives for academic entrepreneurship using the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps) program. I-Corps provides experiential entrepreneurship training to faculty and graduate student researchers at local I-Corps university sites and through a nationwide program. Since the inception of I-Corps, only 20% of participants have been women. We first use survey data from one I-Corps university site to show that women participants had higher social entrepreneurial intentions compared to commercial entrepreneurial intentions, and these social entrepreneurial intentions were higher than men’s. We then extend and generalize this finding by analyzing 1, 267 publicly available project summaries from the National I-Corps Program from 2012-2019. We find that women PIs’ I-Corps project proposals emphasized social impact significantly more than men PIs, while projects for all PIs emphasized commercial impact to a similar degree. We next ran a field experiment to estimate the causal impact of social impact vs. commercial motives by experimentally manipulating the recruitment email messages inviting researchers to participate in the I-Corps training program. We find that women were more likely to show interest in a social impact version of a message compared to a commercial version, while men showed equal interest in both types of messages. Taken together, our results indicate that women are more interested in pursuing commercialization and entrepreneurship activities when they are tackling societal problems. They suggest that low-cost interventions that emphasize the social impact value of entrepreneurial opportunities may increase gender diversity in entrepreneurship activities. |
| JEL: | J16 L26 O31 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32885 |
| By: | Albrecht, James (Georgetown University); Edin, Per-Anders (Uppsala University); Fernández, Raquel (New York University); Lee, Jiwon (New York University); Thoursie, Peter Skogman (Stockholm University); Vroman, Susan (Georgetown University) |
| Abstract: | The distribution of parental leave uptake and childcare activities continues to conform to traditional gender roles. In 2002, with the goal of increasing gender equality, Sweden added a second "daddy month, " i.e., an additional month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. This policy increased men's parental leave uptake and decreased women's, thereby increasing men's share. To understand how various factors contributed to these outcomes, we develop and estimate a quantitative model of the household in which preferences towards parental leave respond to peer behavior. We distinguish households by the education of the parents and ask the model to match key features of the parental leave distribution before and after the reform by gender and household type (the parents' education). We find that changed incentives and, especially, changed social norms played an important role in generating these outcomes whereas changed wage parameters, including the future wage penalty associated with different lengths of parental leave uptake, were minor contributors. We then use our model to evaluate three counterfactual policies designed to increase men's share of parental leave and conclude that giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave or only paying for the length of time equally taken by each parent would both dramatically increase men's share whereas decreasing childcare costs has almost no effect. |
| Keywords: | parental leave, gender equality, childcare, culture |
| JEL: | D10 J16 Z10 Z18 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17210 |