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The glass ceiling in the United States and sweden: Lessons from the family-friendly corner of the world, 1970 to 1990
Abstract
There is a dearth of women in top ranks within the professions and management, and the barriers to women's attaining these top ranks are often referred to as the glass ceiling. In this chapter we shall analyze and compare the glass-ceiling phenomenon in the United States and Sweden. To quantify and analyze this gender rank gap and explain the existence of this glass ceiling, we consider the following questions: What is the effect of gender on the job rank reached? To what extent do other individual factors, such as age, education, work hours, and part- or full-time status, explain the rank reached? And how much of the gender rank gap can be explained by differences between men and women with reference to these other factors? Did the circumstances of women change over the time period studied and, if so, in what way?.
... Sweden is a country with a large welfare system and active policies to help men and women combine work and family (a dual earner family policy model) (Korpi et al. 2009;Meyersson Milgrom and Petersen 2006). One important policy reform for increased gender equality (and labour supply) in Sweden is the individual taxation system that was introduced in 1971. ...
... Gender-egalitarian family policies, like those in Sweden, have been criticized for increasing a gendered labour market where women are trapped in female dominated occupations and with part-time jobs, and for increasing statistical discrimination and for leading to a larger under-representation of women in supervisory positions (Hakim 2000;Mandel and Semyonov 2005;Meyersson Milgrom and Petersen 2006). Studies using Swedish data indicate a larger gender wage gap among men and women with a higher level of education than between men and women with a lower level of education (Evertsson et al. 2007;Evertsson et al. 2009). ...
... Bihagen and Ohls (2006) find that Swedish women are more disadvantaged at the lower levels of the occupational hierarchy, which contradicts the glass ceiling assumption. Meyersson, Milgrom and Petersen (2006) also find gender differences in authority positions in Sweden. In contrast to Wright et al. (1995), they find support for the glass ceiling hypothesis. ...
... In contrast, there are few studies of how female and male managers cope with these strains, or of the potentially mediating role of workload. This is surprising, considering the growing scientific interest in a deeper comprehension of the mediational processes by with gender influences work-family interdependencies, beyond simply looking at direct effects (Parasuraman and Greenhaus, 2002), as well as the political importance placed on cultivating women for managerial careers, notably in Scandinavia (Meyersson and Petersen, 2006). Although recent contributions have provided new insights into the connection between gender and such discord as well as enrichment (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006;Powell and Greenhaus, 2008), the processes linking gender and work-family conflict are still less well understood. ...
... While H1 implies a lower work-family conflict as a result of female managers seeking a lighter workload, H2 suggests that less discord stems from workload constraints imposed on them by the work organization. In this way, the rational view (Cinamon and Rich, 2002;Byron, 2005;Jennings and McDougald, 2007), which emphasizes coping strategies in a preventive manner as a way to minimize anticipated collisions between the work role and the family role, competes with a structural interpretation (Meyersson and Petersen, 2006;Gutek et al., 1991). Both hypotheses presume workload as a mediating factor between gender and work-family conflict. ...
... We find little evidence, however, that managers who perceive such restrictions work markedly less than those who do not, or that the link between gender and job-home strains via workload could result from females being excluded from positions requiring higher commitments. Thus, the resulting pattern is inconsistent with the glass ceiling argument (Meyersson and Petersen, 2006) suggested by the alternative H2. Given no direct information regarding managers' intentions or of actual gender discrimination in the workplace, our data do not, however, allow for a strong test of these alternative hypotheses. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how male and female managers may regulate their workload differently in response to conflicting job‐home pressures. The main hypothesis is that female managers seek to reduce anticipated discord by investing less time in their work role. The paper investigates this postulated link between managers' gender and work‐family conflict via their workload, based on a conceptual model and within a Scandinavian context. The central argument is evaluated against a competing explanation of structural constraints, implying that female managers in stead of choosing reduced workloads are required to work less.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a large survey of Norwegian managers. The applied sample size is 2,195, with 1,740 men and 455 women. In addition to indicators of time‐based work‐family conflict the questionnaire contains detailed information on managers' individual background and positional characteristics. To trace direct and indirect influences of gender over different analytical stages, a step‐wise regression analysis is carried out.
Findings
Initial investigations document that female managers have a lighter workload, more frequently perceive glass ceiling constraints and less often experience work‐family conflict. Step‐wise regression analysis demonstrates that the effect of gender on job‐home tensions is mediated mainly by managers' workload, and is less related to the glass ceiling. This pattern is consistent with central hypothesis, still the alternative explanation cannot be totally ruled out.
Research limitations/implications
This paper is limited to the Scandinavian setting at a single point in time.
Practical implications
It is important that employers recognize the need for more optimal time arrangements for women in higher‐level positions. In addition, female managers could benefit from support networks across work organizations.
Originality/value
This paper is among the first to examine the mediational processes by which gender influences work‐family interdependencies for managers, tracing indirect pathways as well as direct effects for alternative model specifications. A representative sample with a broad set of individual and positional characteristics in combination with a relevant regression approach provides credible and robust results.
... Although the Nordic countries are commonly depicted as the most gender equal in the world and consistently rank at the top of the Global Gender Gap Reports (World Economic Forum, 2010), 1 several studies have suggested that they score low relative to other industrial countries with respect to gender equality in positions of workplace authority and women's chances of obtaining the highest white-collar jobs (Mandel & Semyonov, 2006;Wright, Baxter, & Birkelund, 1995). In previous studies, this finding has often been linked to the prevalence of maternal employment policies, such as long paid maternity leave, with the rationale that female labour market selection tends to be reduced when work and family are easily combined (Albrecht, Björklund, & Vroman, 2003;Henrekson & Stenkula, 2009;Meyersson Milgrom & Petersen, 2006;Rosenfeld & Kalleberg, 1991). This would then make it more difficult for employers to use motherhood status as a screening device for work commitment. ...
... Hence, there is a less pronounced labour market selection in countries with extensive maternal employment policies and statistical gender dis-crimination may therefore be more marked, for example, with respect to women's representation in high positions of workplace authority (cf., Albrecht, Björklund, & Vroman, 2003;Henrekson & Stenkula, 2009;Meyersson Milgrom & Petersen, 2006;Rosenfeld & Kalleberg, 1991). ...
... In other words, when the variable gender (coded 1 for males and 0 for females) has been added to the Mincer regression model in past research, its coefficient has tended to be positive and significant. Accounting for this gender gap has been a frequent topic of research in both labor economics and sociology (Bayard Hellerstein, Neumark, & Troske, 2003;Datta Gupta & Rothstein, 2005;Meyersson Milgrom & Petersen, 2006;Petersen & Morgan, 1995). The a priori human capital explanation of this gender earnings gap would be that women possess less human capital than men. ...
... A natural question then arises as to why is this the case. According to several scholars, men generally receive higher earnings than women because they are over-represented in occupations and occupational positions that pay better, and/or more typically are employed in industries, sectors, establishments or firms with higher mean wages (Blau & Kahn, 2006;Gunderson, 2006;Meyersson Milgrom & Petersen, 2006;Petersen & Morgan, 1995;Weinberger, 1998). In other words, once the wage regressions include variables controlling for these features, the gender coefficient becomes small and (perhaps) insignificant. ...
This paper draws attention to a somewhat neglected field within tourism research, namely the production side of tourism. Set within a human capital framework, the purpose of the study is to examine if and how the variables education, work experience and the socio-demographic variables parenthood and marriage affect Norwegian tourism employees’ annual wages in the 1994–2002 period. Furthermore, the study specifically examines how the variables gender and time affect these wages. Among several findings, four are of major importance. (1) Male tourism employees receive about 20% higher wages annually than their female counterparts, ceteris paribus. (2) There is a concave (i.e. inverted U) relationship between work experience and annual wages for both female and male employees, but this pattern is much less distinct for females. (3) Both parenthood and marriage affect wages, but their effects differ between male and female employees. (4) All tourism employees experience a positive annual wage development in the period studied.
... Compounding the inequality caused by segregation of social categories is hierarchical segregation -the segregation of workers across different ranks in the same job-which grants favored groups with employment opportunities that confer more status, authority, and pay, thereby contributing to earnings and authority gaps (Reskin and Padavic, 1999, p. 348). Glass ceilings -the lack of women in top positions as a result of intangible barriers-can be attributed to actions taken by employers to prevent women from occupying elite positions, the decisions made by employees in job preparation, or institutional features of a labor market (Milgrom and Petersen, 2006). While each contributes in particular ways to gender inequality in writing for film and television, finding remedies to undo them are complicated because Hollywood, as a culture industry, has evolved a distinctive system of production and organizational practices that are profoundly consequential to the employment relation. ...
... This ideological frame may be a central mechanism behind diverging outcomes in the workplace and in families, with substantial progress toward gender equality evidenced in the marketplace and gender inequality persisting within families (England, 2010). Accordingly, women's status in the workplace has improved in multiple ways: The gender pay gap has narrowed (Mandel & Semyonov, 2014), the significance of employer discrimination in promotions has declined (Meyersson Milgrom & Petersen, 2006), increasing numbers of mothers remain employed (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017;Percheski, 2008), and so forth. In contrast, gender equality in the family has lagged behind: Women still do most of the caretaking and housework (Sayer, 2016) and stereotypically gendered patterns in romantic relationships pervade (Fetterolf & Eagly, 2011;Hamilton, Geist, & Powell, 2011). ...
The authors investigated whether trends in attitudes about gender were consistent with the gender stall primarily occurring in the family domain and examined potential mechanisms associated with changing gender norms. Using data from Monitoring the Future surveys (1976–2015), the authors assessed three components of trends in youth's beliefs about gender: the marketplace, the family, and mothers' employment. Findings showed continued increases in egalitarianism from 1976 through the mid-1990s across all three dimensions. Thereafter, support for egalitarianism in the public sphere plateaued at high levels, rising support for mothers' employment persisted at a slower pace, and conventional ideology about gender in families returned. The changing demographic composition of American high school students did not account for the gender attitude trends. Youth's mothers' employment and increased education were related to increased egalitarianism. Changes in population averages of mothers' employment and educational attainment were only weakly associated with increases in egalitarian attitudes.
... The extent to which individuals identify with a field can influence their career-relevant judgments and decisions, thereby affecting what is commonly called the "pipeline" of women in STEM careers (Meyersson Milgrom and Petersen 2006). Our survey questions ask participants to rate the extent to which they personally identify with the tech profession and identify with their companies. ...
Previous research documents how stereotypes discourage young women from choosing and attaining technology jobs. We build off this research and ask whether (and how) stereotypes continue to affect men and women once they enter the technology workforce. Using a novel survey of technical employees from seven Silicon Valley firms and new measures of what we call "cultural" and "skill" alignment, we show that men are more likely than women to believe they possess the stereotypical traits and skills of a successful tech employee. We find that cultural alignment is especially important: because women are less likely than men to believe they match the cultural image of successful tech workers, they are less likely to identify with the tech profession, less likely to report positive supervisor treatment, and more likely to consider switching career fields. This paper is the first to use unique and independent measures of cultural and skill alignment comparing employees' perceptions of themselves to their perceptions of an ideal successful worker. By allowing cultural and skill alignment to operate separately, we are able to determine which work outcomes are most strongly related to each form of alignment. Our results imply that if we can broaden the cultural image of a successful tech worker, women may be more likely to feel like they belong in technology environments, ultimately increasing their retention in tech jobs.
... Moreover, these patterns are stratified such that the least advantaged women are also the least likely to work full-time. Approximately one-third of all employed women are employed part-time and are disproportionately working-class, working-poor, and women of color (England et al. 2004;Milgrom and Petersen 2006). In ...
Despite numerous changes in women's employment in the latter half of the twentieth century, women's employment continues to be uneven and stalled. Drawing from data on women's weekly work hours in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we identify significant inequality in women's labor force experiences across adulthood. We find two pathways of stable full-time work for women, three pathways of part-time employment, and a pathway of unpaid labor. A majority of women follow one of the two full-time work pathways, while fewer than 10 % follow a pathway of unpaid labor. Our findings provide evidence of the lasting influence of work-family conflict and early socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages on women's work pathways. Indeed, race, poverty, educational attainment, and early family characteristics significantly shaped women's work careers. Work-family opportunities and constraints also were related to women's work hours, as were a woman's gendered beliefs and expectations. We conclude that women's employment pathways are a product of both their resources and changing social environment as well as individual agency. Significantly, we point to social stratification, gender ideologies, and work-family constraints, all working in concert, as key explanations for how women are "tracked" onto work pathways from an early age.
... To a certain extent, this can be a by-product of the generous parental leave systems, the opportunities for reducing the working week, and the possibility to take time off work to care for sick children that exists in Sweden. Since all these opportunities are exploited much more by women than by men, it can mean that they default out of the competition for higher status positions in their company and encourage employers to look upon women of childbearing age as more unreliable candidates for top posts (see Meyersson and Petersen 2003 and the works cited therein). ...
A research framework for eliciting the links between class and social attitudes is proposed. It is argued that: such analyses should be based on a concept of class as qualitatively distinct positions in terms of employment relations; such an enterprise should be restricted to the following
four broad attitudinal domains: attitudes to production/work, distribution/market, redistribution/state and reproduction/family; two important tasks are to map the pattern of class differences in attitudes and to test explanatory mechanisms, which can be hypothesised to be class-dependent
interests and class-specific norms; political institutions and political articulation serve to modify the link between class and attitudes; two important contemporary trends in the link between class and politics may be summarised as the re-commodification of labour, and the political de-articulation
of class.
... On the other hand, the limited number of student contact hours in a research university do allow many faculty members to move between work, in particular research, and family obligations in a way that is less likely to be possible in many other highly paid professions. Consistent with the sort of argument found in Esping-Andersen (2004), our results may suggest the importance of familyfriendly work arrangements for gender equity in pay (though, in a comparison of the rates of access to senior management positions in the U.S. and Sweden, Milgrom and Petersen (2006) raise the possibility that family-friendly policies of the Swedish sort damage women's careers by facilitating choices that reduce the amount of career-enhancing experience acquired by women). ...
This study examines the gender pay gap among university faculty by analyzing gender differences in one component of faculty members’ salaries – “market premiums.” The data were collected during the Fall of 2002 using a survey of faculty at a single Canadian research university. Correspondence analysis and logistic regression analysis were performed in order to identify the characteristics related to the award of market premiums and whether these characteristics account for gender differences. The correspondence analysis produces a two-factor solution in which the second axis clearly opposes faculty who receive market premiums to those who do not. Gender is strongly related to this factor, with the female category on the side of the axis associated with the absence of market premiums. The results of the logistic regression confirm that fi eld of specialization, frequency of external research contracts, faculty members’ values and attitudes towards remuneration and seniority within rank are all related to the award of market premiums, as hypothesized. However, women were still almost three times less likely than men to have been awarded market premiums after controlling for these relationships. Overall, the results suggest that within a collective bargaining context, reindividualization of the pay determination process — notably, the payment of market premiums to faculty — may reopen pay differences by gender.
... There, discussions focus on the impact of institutional features such as welfare benefits, including parental leave schemes, and the advantages and disadvantages of board quotas. By contrast in the United States, discussions tend to focus more on anti-discrimination legislation and bureaucratic changes within firms where U.S. firms have been innovators (Milgrom and Petersen, 2006). ...
... Such patterns generally lead to women's greater child-rearing responsibilities, which decrease their likelihood of obtaining equivalent qualifications and work experiences to men's. Consequently, even if employers ignore gender in deciding pay and promotion, as is increasingly likely in affluent countries (Meyersson Milgrom and Petersen 2006), women continue to be disadvantaged in the labor market. Thus, not only does the resistance to private-sphere gender role convergence help perpetuate the status difference between women and men, but it can eventually stall a country's movement toward gender equality in the economic realm. ...
Few cross-national studies distinguish between different aspects of gender egalitarianism and compare them systematically. In this study, we examine cross-national differences in attitudes toward mothers' participation in the labor market and toward gender equality within the household, using a multilevel analysis of individual data from 33 nations. The results indicate greater support for employed mothers, but a lower level of approval of gender equality at home, among residents of countries that offer women more educational and economic opportunities. We argue that macrolevel gender equality increases individuals', particularly women's, incentives to support female labor force participation. Because of a persistent belief in gender differentiation, however, macrolevel gender equality has the opposite relationship with attitudes toward altering gendered practices beyond enabling women's public sphere participation. The fewer explicit barriers to women's achievement in society, the more likely individuals will feel a need to defend gendered roles in the private sphere. That the potential harm of advocating gendered practices in the private sphere is smaller in societies with fewer impediments for women is also likely to account for the negative association between macrolevel gender equality and support for egalitarian gender roles at home.
... Female respondents moved far more often than their male counterparts in order to obtain promotions and undertook riskier appointments in order to progress (see also Haslam & Ryan, 2008). As Cohen, Broschak, and Haveman (1998) report, women wait much longer for promotions if they remain in one firm, especially at senior levels (Martell, Lane, & Emrich, 1996;Meyersson-Milgrom & Petersen, 2006). Additionally, female respondents were often required to move outside their organization or industry to obtain a promotion. ...
Through a comparison of the life and career trajectories of thirty male and thirty female CEOs of large organizations, this study offers insights into the genesis of gender disparity in corporate leadership positions, discusses the implications for leadership development, and puts forward a model explaining the disparity in CEO roles. We found gendered patterns in the accumulation of career relevant experiences stretching back to birth into working lives that created significant and cumulative limitations upon the ability of women to access CEO roles and the types of CEO appointments available to them. Limited access to career relevant experiences in childhood, adolescence and in organizations lead to on-going limitations in capital accumulation throughout women's careers. Implications of our findings for both theory and practice are discussed.
... With respect to vertical segregation, human capital theorists have argued that women may cumulate fewer years of seniority due to part-time work and career interruptions, including maternity leaves (Milgrom and Petersen, 2006). The cumulated seniority of faculty does differ by gender because of women's more recent presence in the academic profession, career interruptions, and delayed career starts (Ornstein and Stewart, 1996;Ornstein et al., 1998;Sussman and Yssaad, 2005). ...
In this case study of faculty at a large Canadian research university we examine the extent to which the gender pay gap varies with the formalization of remuneration practices and female representation within units.
We estimate the respective contributions to the gender pay gap of base pay, access to the rank of full professor, access to and amounts of market supplements, and Canada Research Chairs. These remuneration components differ in their degree of formalization. We also examine variations in the gender pay gap across departments with different proportions of females. The use of multilevel analysis allows for the estimation of the respective contributions of individual and institutional determinants of pay.
Mixed support is found for the first hypothesis – that the magnitude of the gap varies with the degree of formalization in remuneration components. The second hypothesis that, all else being equal, the level of female representation in a given context is negatively related to remuneration is supported. Overall, the results are consistent with continuing female pay disadvantage, even in an ostensibly ‘progressive’ institutional context.
... The little we know about the development of the gender gap in authority over time is that women have increased their share of authority positions, but that the gap remains large. For Sweden, Meyersson Milgrom and Petersen (2006) show that the gender gap in "rank" (i.e., a job's level of difficulty and responsibility among other things) narrowed during the period 1970-1990. Studies using U.S. data indicate that more women in past decades have become managers (Reskin and Padavic 1994;Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2009). ...
Using Swedish panel data, we assess whether the gender gap in supervisory authority has changed during the period 1968-2000,
and investigate to what extent the gap can be attributed to gender-specific consequences of family formation. The results
indicate that the gap has narrowed modestly during the period, and that the life-event of parenthood is a major cause. As
long as women and men are childless and single, the gender gap in supervisory authority is marginal, even reversed. When men
become fathers, however, they strongly increase their chances for supervisory authority whereas women's chances remain unaffected
when they become mothers. We also find a male “marriage premium” on workplace authority, but this premium is generated by
selection.
... Compounding the inequality caused by segregation of social categories is hierarchical segregation -the segregation of workers across different ranks in the same job-which grants favored groups with employment opportunities that confer more status, authority, and pay, thereby contributing to earnings and authority gaps (Reskin and Padavic, 1999, p. 348). Glass ceilings -the lack of women in top positions as a result of intangible barriers-can be attributed to actions taken by employers to prevent women from occupying elite positions, the decisions made by employees in job preparation, or institutional features of a labor market (Milgrom and Petersen, 2006). While each contributes in particular ways to gender inequality in writing for film and television, finding remedies to undo them are complicated because Hollywood, as a culture industry, has evolved a distinctive system of production and organizational practices that are profoundly consequential to the employment relation. ...
This article discusses how employment practices concerning writers of film and television contribute to gender inequality and the glass ceiling in Hollywood. Relying on historical evidence about the industries of film and television and quantitative data from analyses of the employment and membership records of the Writers Guild of America, West, the union for film and television writers in Hollywood, this article presents an overview of the industry's historical transformation from hierarchy to market in order to understand the nature of Hollywood's employment relation. It then examines how the dynamics associated with the participation of women writers contribute to particular forms of gender inequality in film and television. The conclusion considers why proven remedies for minimizing gender inequality are so difficult to achieve in the culture industry of Hollywood.
... These women were also found to represent a rather inelastic labor supply, similar to that of men. Meyersson Petersen (2006) and Albrecht et al. (1999) find that temporary career withdrawals (partial or complete) result in women accumulating less experience, which lowers the likelihood of future promotion. ...
We identify pertinent institutions governing the structure of payoffs with regard to female career progression. Drawing on recent insights in behavioral economics, we hypothesize that interactions between psychological mechanisms and the institutional setup may be important determinants of cross-country differences in the level and evolution of female representation in executive positions in the business sector. We test this proposition informally by exploring whether it can be used to account for some of the observed differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries in this respect. Three particularly important conclusions emerge: (i) broad welfare state policy promotes high female labor force participation, but blunts incentives to pursue top executive positions in the business sector; (ii) therefore, it is likely to be misleading to use the share of female executives as a proxy for gender equality in welfare states; and (iii) psychological mechanisms are likely to amplify the effects of policies and institutions.
... After men and women have become parents, a gender gap arises and lasts throughout the career (see Meyersson Milgrom & Petersen 2006 for a similar conclusion). Results from cross-sectional analyses reveal a "male marriage premium", as well as a "fatherhood premium". ...
We assess whether the gender gap in authority in Sweden has changed during the period 1968–2000, and investigate to what extent family factors are responsible for this gap. We find that the gap has narrowed modestly during this period, and identify the life-event of parenthood as a major cause of the gap. When men become fathers, they gain authority; when women become mothers, they do not. Our fixed effects panel estimates of the effects of family factors deviate from the cross-sectional estimates, suggesting that unobserved individual heterogeneity – routinely neglected in this line of research – matters.
The Problem
Women working across the globe have struggled to achieve positions of leadership while also taking parental leave, accessing affordable child care, and maintaining work–life balance. Alternate models are needed, in particular those relevant to the development and retention of women in the workplace.
The Solution
Scandinavia is leading the world in gender equality (World Economic Forum). Of these progressive Nordic countries, the United Nations Commission has identified Sweden as one of the best countries in the world for women to live and work (World Economic Forum). The purpose of this article is to gain a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of professional women leaders living and working in Sweden.
The Stakeholders
With implications for employee retention and pay equity, this research may be useful for human resource development professionals, leadership developers, and educators. It may also be informative to women across the globe, hoping to learn how other countries treat and support their female and male employees, especially during parental leaves.
Corporate Responsibility (CR) is today an essential component of corporate global strategy. CR can bolster the institutional context for market expansion fill institutional voids or facilitate market entry as a component of non-market strategy. Yet, in fulfilling these functions, CR may need to be highly sensitive to local contexts. How can transnational firms organize CR so as to maximize efficiencies from globalization and to minimize the fragmentation of corporate organizational cultures? provide a framework for analyzing the way that corporations coordinate global and local functions. We build on this framework in a case study of Novo Nordisk and its approach to determining global and local CR policies and procedures with regard to its China and US subsidiaries. Our findings suggest that it is important for companies to define a common set of organizational norms. In addition, CR need to be sensitive to local institutional contexts, but learning from subsidiary experience is important and lends itself to standardization and replication of initiatives across market contexts.
Today, in a world quite different from the one that existed just thirty years ago, both girls and boys play soccer, baseball, softball, and other youth sports. Yet has the dramatic surge in participation by girls contributed to greater gender equality? In this engaging study, leading sociologist Michael A. Messner probes the richly complex gender dynamics of youth sports. Weaving together vivid first-person interviews with his own experiences as a volunteer for his sons' teams, Messner finds that despite the movement of girls into sports, gender boundaries and hierarchies still dominate, especially among the adults who run youth sports. His book widens into a provocative exploration of why youth sports matter-how they play a profound role in shaping gender, class, family, and community.
Using data from the IPUMS-USA, the present research focuses on trends in the gender earnings gap in the United States between 1970 and 2010. The major goal of this article is to understand the sources of the convergence in men's and women's earnings in the public and private sectors as well as the stagnation of this trend in the new millennium. For this purpose, we delineate temporal changes in the role played by major sources of the gap. Several components are identified: the portion of the gap attributed to gender differences in human-capital resources; labor supply; sociodemographic attributes; occupational segregation; and the unexplained portion of the gap. The findings reveal a substantial reduction in the gross gender earnings gap in both sectors of the economy. Most of the decline is attributed to the reduction in the unexplained portion of the gap, implying a significant decline in economic discrimination against women. In contrast to discrimination, the role played by human capital and personal attributes in explaining the gender pay gap is relatively small in both sectors. Differences between the two sectors are not only in the size and pace of the reduction but also in the significance of the two major sources of the gap. Working hours have become the most important factor with respect to gender pay inequality in both sectors, although much more dominantly in the private sector. The declining gender segregation may explain the decreased impact of occupations on the gender pay gap in the private sector. In the public sector, by contrast, gender segregation still accounts for a substantial portion of the gap. The findings are discussed in light of the theoretical literature on sources of gender economic inequality and in light of the recent stagnation of the trend.
In recent years attracting and retaining female managerial talent has become a key focus for corporations. Institutional investors increasingly demand that corporations demonstrate a commitment to gender diversity while women’s groups, such as Catalyst, lobby in favor of more female managers. Governments have also labored to take greater advantage of female talents and skills, both through awareness-raising programs and through new legislation. While there has been much progress when it comes to women reaching high level positions in the private sector, women are still in the minority in top level management. However, female corporate career advancement also varies substantially across OECD countries and explaining national differences is the key focus of this research project.
This paper examines whether women benefit from working under female management using Swedish matched employer-employee panel data. I account for unobserved heterogeneity among both workers and firms potentially correlated with manager gender. The results show a substantial negative and statistically significant correlation between the proportion of female managers and the establishment’s gender wage gap. However, estimates that account for sorting on unobserved worker skills do not support that that managers favor same-sex workers in wage setting. Additional results show female-led organizations recruit more non-managerial, high-wage women but this is primarily due to (unobserved) firm attributes rather than gender-specific management practices.
Résumé
Partant de l'hypothèse selon laquelle les apports en travail domestique des hommes et des femmes sont complémentaires, les auteures vérifient l'existence d'équilibres multiples. Dans certains cas, le travail est réparti àégalité et les salaires sont identiques. Dans d'autres, la répartition est différente, de même que les salaires. Dans ce contexte, les stéréotypes relatifs à l'infériorité de la productivité des femmes se révèlent autoréalisateurs. Partant d'exemples numériques, les auteures montrent que le bien‐être est supérieur lorsque le couple répartit le travail à part égale, puis elles énoncent des recommandations politiques.
According to welfare state theories, women pursuing high-level careers benefit from access to maternity-leave programmes and child care. Yet this is not the complete picture. While theories exploring public policy highlight the contribution of welfare services to the relative productivity of women compared to men, these theories should be complemented with a focus on conditions internal to the firm and in particular the organization of human resources. I focus on IT and pharmaceutical firms in the USA and Denmark, and show that US companies manage compliance by setting clear goals for gender diversity while this is not the case in Denmark. Furthermore, US subsidiaries in Denmark view the US paradigm of equality of outcome as more attractive than the Danish paradigm of equality of opportunity. The Danish welfare state is increasingly seen by human resource managers as inadequate when it comes to promoting female managers in the private sector.
This paper explores sector differences in how the gender wage gap varies across the wage distribution and the role of occupational segregation in explaining this varia-tion for Sweden. Results indicate that the phenomenon known as the glass ceiling, i.e. larger gender wage differentials at the high end of the wage distribution is stronger in the public sector than the private. This difference is found to be due to occupa-tional segregation and , to a large extent, pre-market educational choices. Most of the top/bottom differences within the public sector stem from the county level and is due to gender segregation between few occupations. These results indicate that the mechanisms behind the glass ceiling, and observed sector differences are attributable to occupational segregation by gender.
We study workers’ reactions to changes in the gender composition of top management during a merger or acquisition, finding that an increase in the number of female top managers within their occupation makes male workers more likely to quit, and female workers less likely to quit. These effects vary across occupations, depending on the female share, and male workers’ aversion to female managers is strongest when the female share nears fifty percent. The effects also vary over time and with age, becoming smaller in more recent years and among younger males, but increase with education level. We find little evidence that these preferences are driven by pecuniary effects.
This paper examines the gender composition of the flow of new hirees along the organizational hierarchy of jobs. We find that women have a reduced chance to be hired at higher hierarchical levels. We refer to this phenomenon as the "glass door". The glass door consists of an absolute and a relative effect. First, there is a reduced probability of women being recruited for jobs at higher hierarchical levels. Second, a larger fraction of jobs below the focal level of hiring within the firm reduces the relative inflow of female hirees. The latter component leads women moving to firms in which the job has a lower relative position in the hierarchical structure. We explain the glass door phenomenon by a theoretical model of the firm's decision to hire a woman. The model is based on two key assumptions. First, women have a higher probability of leaving due to their higher valuation of non-market activities. Second, a voluntary quit leads to a larger decrease in the production of lower level co-workers when the worker who leaves has a position in the upper tier of the hierarchy. The glass door implies that the value of women's outside option in the labor market is lower. It may provide an additional explanation of why a glass ceiling can be sustainable as an equilibrium phenomenon.
Why are similar workers paid differently? I review and compare two lines of research that have recently witnessed great progress in addressing “unexplained” wage inequality: (i) worker unobserved heterogeneity in, and sorting by, human capital; (ii) firms’ monopsony power in labor markets characterized by job search frictions. Both lines share a view of wage differentials as an equilibrium phenomenon. Despite their profound conceptual and technical differences, they remain natural competitors in this investigation. Unlike other hypotheses, they provide natural and unifying explanations for job and worker flows, unemployment duration and incidence, job-to-job quits, and the shape of the wage distribution.
Although the features of individual careers are influenced by the personnel
administrative rules of work organizations, the rules themselves rarely have
been examined. Rather, one generally attempts to infer the nature of the
attainment process by investigating the results of the process, as seen in
the salary and status trajectories of a population sample, and by relating
this to individual background characteristics. In this paper, in contrast, we
directly examine organizational rules. We investigate administrative specifications
with respect to salary advancement and promotion in a variety of
work settings; in particular, in police departments, public school systems,
the construction industry, and several private-sector organizations. The
sources of the organizational rules are union contracts and company data
about their human resource systems. Based on this material we introduce
the concepts of simple structure, unitary structure, and amalgam structure
to summarize the alternate formulations of career evolution that appear in
the administrative rules. Finally, we discuss the extent to which the administrative rules actually constrain the attainments of individuals.
Using logit analysis on 1 percent samples of federal personnel records for 1973-82, this paper finds strikingly similar promotion probabilities for white men and women, once a variety of individual characteristics are accounted for.
It has been established for the USA that men and women working in the same occupation for the same employer receive more or less the same pay. So-called within-job wage discrimination is hence not a driving force for the gender wage gap. Below we report the first comparative arid the second comprehensive empirical study of wage differences between men and women in the same specific occupation within the same establishment for a European economy: Norway. We report three striking findings. The first is that wage differences are relatively small when one compares men and women who work in the same occupation and establishment: women on average earn 2-6 per cent less per hour than men. The second finding is that it is occupational segregation which really accounts for the existing wage differences and that establishment segregation accounts for less. The third finding is that the within-occupation gaps are relatively small, at less than 10 per cent. We conducted these analyses for two years, 1984 and 1990.
We present an explanation for the persistence of gender segregation in occupations and for the observed cross-country differences in its extent. Agents have imperfect information about their probability of success in different occupations and base their career choices on prior beliefs about these probabilities. Beliefs are updated according to Bayes's rule, implying that past differences in preferences over occupations across genders affect the beliefs of the current generation. Consequently, even when men and women become identical in their preferences, their career choices differ. Moreover, the way in which preferences change is shown to affect the degree of segregation.
"A striking characteristic of recent Western labour market trends is the rise in employment among mothers of very young children. So far, few studies have analysed the impact of public policies on employment rates of young mothers. In this study we address this issue by comparing two similar countries, Norway and Sweden, which have the same set of policies with slight variations, using data sets with similar designs. We analyse rates of re-entry into paid work after first birth for mothers in 1968-88 by means of hazard regression. One important finding is that the right to paid maternity leave with job security greatly speeds up the return to work."