Gender Gaps
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)
- Chair: Wendy Stock, Montana State University
Gender, Occupation Choice, Field of Study, and Labor Market Outcome
Abstract
Wages differ substantially by both occupation and field of study choices, but studies on the returns to education presume that education is unidimensional, and job search-and-match theory treats human capital as homogeneous regardless of education background. In addition to fields of study having different labor market payoffs, individuals who choose the same field of study may have different occupation choices, and vice versa. We empirically examine the effect of occupation choice and field of study on wage, with emphasis on gender differences. Using the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG), a National Science Foundation's biennial survey for educations and jobs of college graduates with bachelor degrees or higher, we estimate the effect of occupation choice and field of study as a multi-valued treatment effect with field switching as an IV. A distinctive benefit of using the NSCG is that the fields of study and occupation categories are consistent, which are: i) computer and mathematical sciences/scientists; ii) biological, agricultural and other life sciences/scientists; iii) physical and related sciences/scientists; iv) social and related sciences/scientists; v) engineers; vi) science and engineering-related occupations; vii) non-science and engineering occupations.From our preliminary analysis, we find that: i) occupation choices and fields of study differ substantially by gender; ii) wage differs substantially by occupation within each field of study, and also by field of study within each occupation; and iii) the higher the degree qualification, the greater the wage differences by gender. The greatest wage differences in occupation and field of study by gender are reported from the sample with doctorates, then the sample with master's degrees. We find no evidence of significant wage differences by gender for the sample with bachelor degrees.
Gender and the Dynamics of Economics Seminars
Abstract
We provide the first systematic attempt at quantitatively measuring the seminar culture within economics and testing whether it is gender neutral. Our data was collected as part of an unusual collaboration with the Seminar Dynamics Collective, a group of (mainly) graduate students who volunteered to analyze seminar dynamics and collect and code relevant data. In winter, spring and summer 2019, they hand-coded data on every interaction between a seminar speaker and their audience in 460 economics talks—including junior faculty recruitment seminars—across most leading economics departments, as well as nearly all talks at the NBER Summer Institute which is a leading annual economics conference. Our rich microdata record the time, duration, type and tenor of each interaction, including the gender and seniority of those making interjections, as well as the gender and many other attributes of the presenter and the research they are presenting. We find that even after including rich controls women presenters are asked 12 percent more questions and the questions asked of women are more likely to be patronizing or hostile. This disparity appears most pronounced during recruitment (“job market”) talks and regular seminars with an external (rather than in-house) speaker. While conference presentations are typically less interactive than university seminars, we still detect a gender gap in questions asked, particularly in macroeconomics. Interactions at conferences are typically more highly structured, and our tests of whether differences in the rules can mitigate these gender differences finds surprisingly little evidence that these rules curb the biases we document. Our findings add to an emerging literature documenting ways in which women in economics are treated differently than men and suggest that the current institutional arrangements are not gender neutral, falling far short of the recently adopted AEA Code of Professional Conduct.Credit Conditions and the Gender Wage Gap
Abstract
We propose an "asset channel of inequality" that contributes to gender inequities. We establish that industries with low (high) gender pay gaps have high (low) shares of tangible assets. Because asset tangibility determines firms' ability to collateralize assets and borrow, credit conditions affect industries differently. We show that credit expansions further reduce the pay gap in low-pay-gap industries while leaving it unaffected in high-pay-gap industries, making low-pay-gap industries more appealing for women. Consequently, gender sorting across industries increases, which then cements gender roles and accentuates workplace gender bias. Ultimately, credit expansions help women "swim upstream" but also reinforce glass ceilings.Token Women: Supervisory and Management Boards
Abstract
In this study we utilize unique database of over 100 million firms in over the period of two decades across 44 advanced and emerging European countries and analyze the role of women on supervisory boards for management diversity. Admittedly, gender diversity for the board positions of private, non-listed companies remains off the radar of empirical analyses. We propose novel gender assignment, which is based on identified board members and linguistic rules differentiating between men and women based on names or surnames. This allows us to go back in time to the times when no database provided data on gender of board members, i.e. early 1990s. The firms in our sample list some 100 million of the supervisory and management board members and cover a substantial share of output and employment in the analyzed countries.Our study provides two novel results. First, the positive spillovers from women on supervisory boards to gender diversity among management is limited to listed companies and does not exist for the non-listed companies. Paraphrasing, in contrast to the earlier evidence we find that women “do not help” women in corporate Europe. Specifically, we replicate the Matsa& Miller (2011, 2013) result for the stock-listed companies and show that for the private (non-listed) companies there is no link between gender diversity of among supervisory (non-executive) directors and diversity among top managers.
Second, we show that even among the stock-listed firms, the earlier results are driven entirely by tokenization of women on boards: once we exclude the cases of boards with single women, also among the listed firms the spillovers on gender diversity are no longer identifiable. Hence, we show that raising gender diversity in management positions is not likely achieved through mandating diversity in supervisory (non-executive) boards and alternative instruments are necessary for reaching this policy objective.
Gender Disparities in STEM Majors and Occupations: The Role of Early Skill Profiles
Abstract
This paper aims to analyze the factors underlying underrepresentation of women in certain STEM fields. Although there has been substantial male-female wage convergence over time, there remains a persistent gap among college graduates that has been shown to be attributable, in part, to males and females choosing different college majors and occupations. Majors in applied STEM fields, such as computer science and engineering, are among the highest paid and are also those in which the representation of women is 20% or lower. Occupation and industry segregation was recently found by Cortes and Pan (2018) to constitute the largest portion of the explained component of the gender wage gap in 2010.Using the NLSY79 and NLSY97 longitudinal datasets, this paper documents the adolescent skill (di)convergence by gender over the last four decades in terms of math, verbal, science, mechanical, and social skills and estimate machine learning models to identify the skills, high school course-taking and family background characteristics that are most predictive of one's educational attainment, choice of college major and occupation. I distinguish among non-STEM, pure-STEM and applied-STEM majors, as the pattern of female entry into pure-STEM and applied-STEM categories has been quite different. A nonparametric decomposition to empirically assess the relative importance of different factors is also performed. The results show that with men and women converging on math, administrative, science, and mechanical skills among the lower quintiles, the younger cohort displays less effect of skill gaps on major and occupation segregation. Although mechanical skills are found by the literature to constitute mainly the low-skilled workers’ human capital, this study finds that conditional on having a four-year college degree, the level of one’s mechanical skills is the most predictive factor of whether one chooses the applied-STEM fields, the most lucrative of all fields within this non/pure/applied-STEM taxonomy.
JEL Classifications
- J7 - Labor Discrimination