The gender wage gap declined substantially from 1980 to 2010. What factors contributed to this decline, and how do we account for the gap that remains? This week’s WAPPP seminar featured Francine Blau, Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Professor Blau presented new empirical evidence on the extent, trends, and sources of the gender wage gap and used this new evidence as a springboard to review the existing literature on the gender wage gap.
In 1980, women on average earned 62.1% of what men earned, a wage gap of roughly 38%. By 1989, the ratio of women’s to men’s earning had increased to 74%, to 77.2% in 1998, and to 79.3% in 2010. This stark change is impressive, but it’s also important to not how much of the increase occurred in the 1980s. Since then, progress in decreasing the gender wage gap has been slower and less consistent.
Professor Blau incorporated two major specifications into her regression analyses. The first, a human capital specification, controls for education and experience. The other controls for variables like occupation, industry, and unionism. The first category includes differences most often affected by choices individuals make about their own lives, whereas the second category can be heavily influenced by the employer.
Using these two specifications, we can examine the gender wage gap to see how much these factors explain the variation in earnings between men and women. For example, in 1980 the unadjusted ratio of women’s earning to men’s was 62.1%, but controlling for the human capital specification, the ratio was 71.1%. This tells us that experience and education accounted for a great deal of the gap. Adding in the second specification, the ratio climbs to 79.4%. While this analysis demonstrates that all of these control variables play an important role in the gender wage gap, there is still a large portion that remains unexplained. In the data from 1980, women with the same characteristics as men nevertheless earned 20% less.
In 2010, the unadjusted gender wage ratio of 79.4% rises to 82.1% controlling for human capital variables and to 91.6% with the full specification. Experience still accounts for a large portion of the gender wage gap in the 2010 data, but interestingly education now detracts from the explanation. Women are now better educated than men, on average, but education appears to be doing less “work” for them in terms of reducing the gender wage gap. Women’s more frequent workforce interruptions and subsequent fewer years of work experience are now contributing more to the continuation of the wage gap.
Interestingly, it appears that the gender wage gap is closing more slowly at the top of the wage distribution. Professor Blau compared women to men in the 10th percentile, 50th percentile, and the 90th percentile of the wage distribution. In 1980, the ratio of women’s wages to men’s was roughly the same across each of these percentile groups – approximately 60%. In 2010, the wage ratio of women to men in the 10th percentile was 82%, 81% in the 50th percentile, and yet only 73.8% for the 90th percentile. Can this discrepancy be explained by differences in characteristics between women and men in the 90th percentile? Examining the descriptive statistics, there aren’t any significant differences that would account for a gap of this size. Understanding why women at the top are faring particularly poorly, and why this development is occurring now, is an important area for future research.
What accounts for the overall decrease in the gender wage gap? One particularly important answer is that women worked hard for what they got! Women improved their skills, both in terms of their educational attainment – women now receive 57% of Bachelor’s degrees – and their labor force attachment and years of experience. The gender gap in full-time experience fell from 6.8 years to 1.4 years between 1980 and 2010. The change in this gap mostly reflects female gains, but has also been impacted by worse outcomes for men, particularly an increase in unemployment during the recession. Women also moved out of traditionally female clerical and service jobs into higher-paying and traditionally male managerial and professional occupations.
Traditional explanations for the gender wage gap tend to focus on discrimination and differences in human capital. While human capital factors account for less than they did in the past, they remain very important. According to Professor Blau, the economics literature is now incorporating newer explanations for the gender wage gap, such as non-cognitive skills and psychological attributes. For example, women tend to be less comfortable negotiating and tend to shy away from competitively-based compensation schemes, which can negatively affect their wages. In addition, gender norms may play a significant role in the remaining gender wage gap. One paper investigated the norm that a wife should not earn more than her husband and found that if a wife is predicted to earn more than her husband, she is less likely to participate in the labor market or, if she does, her income is lower than would be predicted based on her other attributes. These newer insights about gender differences in non-cognitive skills and the relevance of social norms pertaining to gender may help to illuminate still-unexplained aspects of the gender wage gap, but are not a silver bullet.
Showing posts with label human capital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human capital. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Climbing the Ladder: Gender and Careers in Public Service with Amy E. Smith
Much of the research on gender inequality in senior management positions focuses on the private sector and why women don’t ascend to these positions. What are we missing by not considering the public sector or the characteristics of women who do reach the upper echelons? This week’s WAPPP seminar feature Amy E. Smith, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston. Professor Smith presented findings from her research collaboration’s work on Climbing the Ladder: Gender and Careers in Public Service.
Background and Motivation
Social equality and representation are important values in the public sector. We believe both that public sector jobs should be equally accessible to everyone and that those who work in the public sector should look like the people they serve across a variety of demographic characteristics. If bureaucrats reflect the diversity of the populations they serve, the logic goes, a variety of interests will be represented in the decision-making process. Representation also has symbolic power – citizens are more likely to feel that they have been heard, are more likely to cooperate with government, and are more likely to feel that the government is accessible if government officials look like them.
However, there is still a significant lack of gender diversity in leadership positions. There have been a number of reasons posited for this discrepancy, including male advantages in accessing, accumulating, and invoking human and social capital, divergences between our gender stereotypes and conceptions of what leaders should be, and familial expectations and work-life conflict. However, as noted, these mechanisms explain why women don’t make it to senior leadership roles, rather than illuminating what helps women achieve these positions. We have limited information about career paths into public sector leadership for both men and women. Once we have this information, we may be better able to design workplace policies to promote gender equality.
Research Findings
Professor Smith’s research focuses on two key questions: what do career paths look like for those who have achieved high-level leadership positions in public sector organizations? And how do men and women who are in these positions express their qualifications?
This research focuses on U.S. federal regulatory organizations, like the FDA and SEC, partially because these organizations have broad power and because there are a significant proportion of women in high-ranking positions. At the time of this study, 36% of senior leadership roles in these organizations were filled by women, compared to 18% of Congressional seats, and 15% of corporate boards. Professor Smith and her collaborators selected the 12 major federal regulatory agencies and identified all top-level leaders for the period from 1983 to 2013, a sample of 89 individuals. Of these 89, they were able to collect career path data for 83 individuals, 61 men and 22 women. The researchers established complete career histories for each person from the time they graduated from college to 2013. For each year, the researchers coded whether the individual worked for a federal agency, a private sector organization, and law firm, or “other,” including nonprofit organizations or other levels of government.
Descriptively, the women in the sample tended to spend less time in each organization, worked at fewer organizations overall, had fewer children, tended to work in newer and larger regulatory organizations, and tended to work for organizations that were responsible for implementing more legislation and engaging in more rulemaking.
Professor Smith and her colleagues looked at career patterns using a sequence analysis of the career histories to generate clusters with similar characteristics. Women in the sample clustered into three career patterns. The first group, which Professor Smith calls “public servants,” was characterized by work in federal agencies and the “other” category of nonprofit and government work. The second group was the “sector hoppers,” characterized by movement back and forth between private sector organizations and federal regulatory agencies. The third group, the attorneys, all worked in law firms at some point in their careers.
For men in the sample, Professor Smith identified four career paths. The “movers,” the largest group, showed a pattern of moving between organizational types. The “sector hoppers,” by contrast, moved only between private sector and federal regulatory organizations. The third group, the “public sector attorneys,” worked predominantly in federal agencies, as compared to the “private sector attorneys” who tended to practice in law firms. The key takeaway from the career pattern analysis is that men, more so than women, seem to develop their career paths by moving across sectors and organizations.
The second key research question asks: how do men and women establish and express legitimacy for leadership positions? Many of the characteristics we associate with leaders are incompatible with our stereotypes about women – where leaders are decisive and aggressive, we expect women to be kind and collaborative. As such, women may engage in extra efforts to signal an appropriate leadership identity. Professor Smith and her collaborators collected the Senate confirmation hearing transcripts for 67 of the 83 individuals in the sample and examined both their self-narratives – the stories each individual told about themselves and their qualifications – as well as their interactions with committee members. While coding the transcripts is still a work in progress, Professor Smith has identified three key mechanisms for claiming legitimacy: proving, selling, and challenging.
When nominees read their personal statements in front of the committee, they are engaging in proving: by narrating their experiences and talking about their personal histories, nominees create a unique identity and position themselves as leaders. Female nominees in the examined transcripts tended to be backward-looking in their proving, discussing their past experiences and establishing themselves as public servants. By contrast, male nominees tend to be a bit more forward-looking in their proving. It may be that male nominees were already considered qualified, and therefore felt more comfortable discussing their future plans for the organization rather than discussing their past experiences.
Selling is characterized by a third party talking about the nominee, largely through introductions and endorsements. Selling behaviors directed toward female nominees tended to list and repeat the nominee’s past experience to lend her credibility and gain approval from the committee. Interestingly, for male nominees there was very little selling. Male nominees’ prior qualifications appear to be almost assumed, whereas female nominees’ qualifications must be reiterated to truly sink in.
Finally, challenging provides the greatest opportunity to observe nominees’ interactions with committee members. Questions directed at female nominees focused repeatedly on technical expertise and management challenges associated with leading the agency. Male nominees generally did not get these sorts of questions, as if, Professor Smith emphasized, these competencies appear to be assumed. Instead, male nominees were often asked forward-looking questions about how to handle emerging issues, and many were asked non-questions.
Considering the two research questions together, we see that both men and women are accumulating social and human capital, but that women tend to accumulate social capital through strong ties and dense networks and human capital that is narrow and specialized, as evidenced by the “public servant” career pattern. Men tended to show more weak ties, sparse networks, and more varied human capital. While both men and women engage in narrative identity work to express their qualifications, women face a gendered twist. Their senior leadership roles and the experiences that got them there violate gendered expectations of what a leader looks like. However, these women’s expression of their qualifications seems to fall back in line with female stereotypes, as they look backwards and repeat their relevant experiences to prove their legitimacy.
Directions for Future Research
These early results are an exciting starting point for more research in this area. Now that we know something about career patterns and claiming legitimacy, qualitative follow-up work may illuminate why career patterns differ based on gender and what other factors have influenced pivotal career choices.
Background and Motivation
Social equality and representation are important values in the public sector. We believe both that public sector jobs should be equally accessible to everyone and that those who work in the public sector should look like the people they serve across a variety of demographic characteristics. If bureaucrats reflect the diversity of the populations they serve, the logic goes, a variety of interests will be represented in the decision-making process. Representation also has symbolic power – citizens are more likely to feel that they have been heard, are more likely to cooperate with government, and are more likely to feel that the government is accessible if government officials look like them.
However, there is still a significant lack of gender diversity in leadership positions. There have been a number of reasons posited for this discrepancy, including male advantages in accessing, accumulating, and invoking human and social capital, divergences between our gender stereotypes and conceptions of what leaders should be, and familial expectations and work-life conflict. However, as noted, these mechanisms explain why women don’t make it to senior leadership roles, rather than illuminating what helps women achieve these positions. We have limited information about career paths into public sector leadership for both men and women. Once we have this information, we may be better able to design workplace policies to promote gender equality.
Research Findings
Professor Smith’s research focuses on two key questions: what do career paths look like for those who have achieved high-level leadership positions in public sector organizations? And how do men and women who are in these positions express their qualifications?
This research focuses on U.S. federal regulatory organizations, like the FDA and SEC, partially because these organizations have broad power and because there are a significant proportion of women in high-ranking positions. At the time of this study, 36% of senior leadership roles in these organizations were filled by women, compared to 18% of Congressional seats, and 15% of corporate boards. Professor Smith and her collaborators selected the 12 major federal regulatory agencies and identified all top-level leaders for the period from 1983 to 2013, a sample of 89 individuals. Of these 89, they were able to collect career path data for 83 individuals, 61 men and 22 women. The researchers established complete career histories for each person from the time they graduated from college to 2013. For each year, the researchers coded whether the individual worked for a federal agency, a private sector organization, and law firm, or “other,” including nonprofit organizations or other levels of government.
Descriptively, the women in the sample tended to spend less time in each organization, worked at fewer organizations overall, had fewer children, tended to work in newer and larger regulatory organizations, and tended to work for organizations that were responsible for implementing more legislation and engaging in more rulemaking.
Professor Smith and her colleagues looked at career patterns using a sequence analysis of the career histories to generate clusters with similar characteristics. Women in the sample clustered into three career patterns. The first group, which Professor Smith calls “public servants,” was characterized by work in federal agencies and the “other” category of nonprofit and government work. The second group was the “sector hoppers,” characterized by movement back and forth between private sector organizations and federal regulatory agencies. The third group, the attorneys, all worked in law firms at some point in their careers.
For men in the sample, Professor Smith identified four career paths. The “movers,” the largest group, showed a pattern of moving between organizational types. The “sector hoppers,” by contrast, moved only between private sector and federal regulatory organizations. The third group, the “public sector attorneys,” worked predominantly in federal agencies, as compared to the “private sector attorneys” who tended to practice in law firms. The key takeaway from the career pattern analysis is that men, more so than women, seem to develop their career paths by moving across sectors and organizations.
The second key research question asks: how do men and women establish and express legitimacy for leadership positions? Many of the characteristics we associate with leaders are incompatible with our stereotypes about women – where leaders are decisive and aggressive, we expect women to be kind and collaborative. As such, women may engage in extra efforts to signal an appropriate leadership identity. Professor Smith and her collaborators collected the Senate confirmation hearing transcripts for 67 of the 83 individuals in the sample and examined both their self-narratives – the stories each individual told about themselves and their qualifications – as well as their interactions with committee members. While coding the transcripts is still a work in progress, Professor Smith has identified three key mechanisms for claiming legitimacy: proving, selling, and challenging.
When nominees read their personal statements in front of the committee, they are engaging in proving: by narrating their experiences and talking about their personal histories, nominees create a unique identity and position themselves as leaders. Female nominees in the examined transcripts tended to be backward-looking in their proving, discussing their past experiences and establishing themselves as public servants. By contrast, male nominees tend to be a bit more forward-looking in their proving. It may be that male nominees were already considered qualified, and therefore felt more comfortable discussing their future plans for the organization rather than discussing their past experiences.
Selling is characterized by a third party talking about the nominee, largely through introductions and endorsements. Selling behaviors directed toward female nominees tended to list and repeat the nominee’s past experience to lend her credibility and gain approval from the committee. Interestingly, for male nominees there was very little selling. Male nominees’ prior qualifications appear to be almost assumed, whereas female nominees’ qualifications must be reiterated to truly sink in.
Finally, challenging provides the greatest opportunity to observe nominees’ interactions with committee members. Questions directed at female nominees focused repeatedly on technical expertise and management challenges associated with leading the agency. Male nominees generally did not get these sorts of questions, as if, Professor Smith emphasized, these competencies appear to be assumed. Instead, male nominees were often asked forward-looking questions about how to handle emerging issues, and many were asked non-questions.
Considering the two research questions together, we see that both men and women are accumulating social and human capital, but that women tend to accumulate social capital through strong ties and dense networks and human capital that is narrow and specialized, as evidenced by the “public servant” career pattern. Men tended to show more weak ties, sparse networks, and more varied human capital. While both men and women engage in narrative identity work to express their qualifications, women face a gendered twist. Their senior leadership roles and the experiences that got them there violate gendered expectations of what a leader looks like. However, these women’s expression of their qualifications seems to fall back in line with female stereotypes, as they look backwards and repeat their relevant experiences to prove their legitimacy.
Directions for Future Research
These early results are an exciting starting point for more research in this area. Now that we know something about career patterns and claiming legitimacy, qualitative follow-up work may illuminate why career patterns differ based on gender and what other factors have influenced pivotal career choices.
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