Abstract
This paper focuses on the impact that gender segregation in the labour market exerts on the underemployment gender gap for young adult workers in Spain. In order to analyse the relative importance of segregation in this gap, we develop a methodology based on two counterfactual simulations that provides a detailed decomposition of the gap into endowments and coefficients effects as well as the interaction of these effects. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to perform a decomposition using bivariate probit models with sample selection. Using annual samples of the Spanish Labour Force Survey 2006–2016, the results show that working in female-dominated occupations or industries hinders working as many hours as desired, especially for women. Furthermore, we conclude that the gender gap in underemployment is mainly due to the different distribution of male and female workers across occupations and industries. Additionally, the different impact by gender that working in the same gender-typing jobs exerts on the risk of underemployment contributes to widening the gap.
Highlights
Time-related underemployment, which refers to those workers who would like to work more hours than available, is a persistent problem in labour markets and the Spanish one is no exception
Our approach does not require a one-to-one matching of individuals, since we replicate the distribution of each specific variable and the number of women who have a specific characteristic changed is just those strictly necessary, so we keep almost real individuals
When segregation is defined in relation to activity sectors, our results indicate that women in female-dominated industries show the highest likelihood of underemployment
Summary
Time-related underemployment, which refers to those workers who would like to work more hours than available, is a persistent problem in labour markets and the Spanish one is no exception This problem increased during the Great Recession in many countries (Bell and Blanchflower 2013; Acosta-Ballesteros et al 2018). To the best of our knowledge, only Vuluku et al (2013) have tried to explain the underemployment gender gap, but they did not include any occupational and industry segregation indicators in their study. To overcome this shortcoming in the literature, the main objective of this article is to carry out an in-depth analysis of the underemployment gender gap.
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