Labour Market Segregation Research Articles

From sending to host societies: immigration in Greece, Ireland and Spain in the 21st century

ABSTRACTIn a relatively short period of time, new immigration patterns have changed the geography of immigration of the EU15, bringing three old emigration countries, Ireland, Spain and Greece, to the forefront of the new immigration wave. This article studies the analogies and differences of the recent immigration experience of this group of countries, focusing on the demographic characteristics of the immigrants (origin, sex, gender and education), labour market insertion (wages, labour market segregation and quality of matching) and overall economic performance in terms of poverty rates.

The Gender Pay Gap in Management Positions in the Private Sector in Germany (Der 'Gender Pay Gap' in Fuehrungspositionen der Privatwirtschaft in Deutschland)

Although there are a variety of studies on the gender pay gap, only a few relate to managerial positions. The present study attempts to fill this gap. Managers in private companies in Germany are a highly selective group of women and men, who differ only marginally in their human capital endowments. The Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition shows that the gender pay gap in the gross monthly salary can hardly be explained using the human capital approach. Adding variables on gender-specific labor market segregation and dimensions of the household and family to the model allows more than two-thirds of the gender pay gap to be explained. However, taking selection effects in a managerial position into account (Heckman correction), the proportion explained decreases to only one-third. This reveals the real extent to which women are disadvantaged on the labor market. In addition, we observe not only that the wages in typical women’s jobs are lower than in typical men’s jobs but also that women are paid less than men in typical women’s jobs. The two-thirds of the gender pay gap that remain unexplained represent the unobserved heterogeneity. This includes, for example, general societal and cultural conditions as well as structures and practices on the labor market and in companies that subject women to pay discrimination and pose an obstacle to them breaking the glass ceiling.

The Organizational Practice of Gendered Employment: Disparate Impact and Gender Segregation in the Japanese Entry-Level Labor Market

This article discusses the supposedly “gender-neutral” Japanese organizational hiring practice of using a track-based employment system. In this system, prospective employees are required to accept nationwide transfers in residence to obtain career-track positions. Women have difficulty fulfilling this requirement because of cultural expectations to settle down and tend to domestic affairs (day care is often hard to access). Using job placement data on graduates from a Japanese university, I found that women are more likely to be hired into firms without this track system, where they are mostly hired for non-career-track positions. Therefore, seemingly gender-neutral bureaucratic rules actually disparately affect women, maintaining gender inequality in the corporate-centered economy of Japan.

Germany's Next Top Manager: Does Personality Explain the Gender Career Gap?

The female share in management positions is quite low in Germany. The higher the hierarchical level, the fewer women there are in such positions. Men have numerous role models to follow whereas women lack this opportunity. Many studies have focused on the influence of human capital and other objective factors on career opportunities. In our study, we go a step further by also looking at the impact of self-reported personality traits on gender differences in career chances. We compare managers and other white-collar employees in Germany’s private sector. While bivariate results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in 2007 show that there are significant gender differences in personality traits, multivariate estimations and the decomposition of the gender career gap clearly indicate that these differences cannot account for gender differences in career opportunities. The decomposition (according to Fairlie, 2003) shows that only 8.6 percent of the inequality of career chances between women and can be explained by differences in personality. Nevertheless, personality traits might indeed play a role, albeit more indirectly: Some of the stronger career effects, such as long working hours, and labour market segregation, can also reflect differences in personality traits. These might have been influenced at an early stage by a gender-biased environment. Our results strongly stress the need for a gender-neutral environment outside and inside companies in order to enforce equal career opportunities for women and men.

Labour Market Impact of Large Scale Internal Migration on Chinese Urban 'Native' Workers

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban 'native' workers' employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and other public facilities. This paper examines the causal relationship between rural-urban migration and urban native workers' labour market outcomes in Chinese cities. After controlling for the endogeneity problem our results show that rural migrants in urban China have modest positive or zero effects on the average employment and insignificant impact on earnings of urban workers. When examine the impact on unskilled labours we once again find it to be positive and insignificant. We conjecture that the reason for the lack of adverse effects is due partially to the labour market segregation between the migrants and urban natives, and partially due to the complementarities between the two groups of workers. Further investigation reveals that the increase in migrant inflow is related to the demand expansion and that if the economic growth continues, elimination of labour market segregation may not necessarily lead to an adverse impact of migration on urban native labour market outcomes.

Does Hiring Discrimination Cause Gender Segregation in the Swedish Labor Market?

This paper studies gender discrimination at hiring in the Swedish labor market. It examines data compiled from an experiment conducted in 2005–6 in which two qualitatively identical applications, one with a woman's name on it and the other with a man's name, were sent to employers advertising positions in Stockholm and Gothenburg (the two largest labor markets in Sweden). The study adds to previous international field experiments by providing additional analysis of the Swedish labor market to determine whether hiring discrimination is a primary cause of occupational gender segregation. The results show that, on average, women have a somewhat higher callback rate to interview in female-dominated occupations, while in male-dominated occupations there is no evidence of gender difference. These findings suggest that the bulk of the prevailing gender segregation in Sweden cannot be explained by discrimination in hiring.

Personality and Career - She’s Got What it Takes

The female share in management positions is quite low in Germany. The higher the hierarchical level, the fewer women there are in such positions. Men have numerous role models to follow whereas women lack this opportunity: In the executive boards of the top 200 private companies in Germany, only 2.5 percent of members are female. Many studies have focused on the influence of human capital and other objective factors on career opportunities. In our study, we go a step further by also looking at the impact of self-reported personality traits on gender differences in career chances. We compare managers and other white-collar employees in Germany’s private sector. While bivariate results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in 2005 show that there are significant gender differences in personality traits, multivariate estimations clearly indicate that these differences cannot account for gender differences in career opportunities. Nevertheless, personality traits might indeed play a role, albeit more indirectly: some of the stronger career effects, such as work experience, long working hours, and labour market segregation, can also reflect differences in personality traits. These might have been influenced at an early stage by a gender-biased environment. Our results strongly stress the need for a gender-neutral environment outside and inside companies in order to enforce equal career opportunities for women and men.

The Effect of Geography, Education and Labor Market Segregation on Women’s Economic Status in New York State

Using census data, the author looks at the relationships between gender earnings disparities and several dimensions, including geographic location, level of education, and employer type. White men's earnings are generally higher than that of all women and all minority men and that while men earn more than women within almost all population segments, the disparities between White women and White men are different from those between women of color and men of color. The greatest earnings parity between men and women exists within metropolitan areas. While earnings increase for both women and men as education increases, the earnings gap between women and men remains fairly consistent, with the category of professional degrees, where the gap is much larger being an exception. The greatest earnings disparities exist among the self-employed and within local government and the greatest gender earnings parity within the federal government, suggesting that where requirements for parity are institutional, they reduce the gender gap.

Glass Ceiling Effect and Earnings - The Gender Pay Gap in Managerial Positions in Germany

Although there are a variety of studies on the gender pay gap, only a few relate to managerial positions. The present study attempts to fill this gap. Managers in private companies in Germany are a highly selective group of women and men, who differ only marginally in their human capital endowments. The Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition shows that the gender pay gap in the gross monthly salary can hardly be explained using the human capital approach. Adding variables on gender-specific labor market segregation and dimensions of the household and family to the model allows more than two-thirds of the gender pay gap to be explained. However, taking selection effects in a managerial position into account (Heckman correction), the proportion explained decreases to only one-third. This reveals the real extent to which women are disadvantaged on the labor market. In addition, we observe not only that the wages in typical women’s jobs are lower than in typical men’s jobs but also that women are paid less than men in typical women’s jobs. The two-thirds of the gender pay gap that remain unexplained represent the unobserved heterogeneity. This includes, for example, general societal and cultural conditions as well as structures and practices on the labor market and in companies that subject women to pay discrimination and pose an obstacle to them breaking the glass ceiling.

With Friends Like These: Endogenous Labor Market Segregation with Homogeneous, Nonprejudiced Agents

AbstractIn the economics literature, labor market segregation is typically assumed to arise either from prejudice (Becker 1971) or from group differences in human capital accumulation (Benabou 1993; Durlauf 2006; Fryer 2006). Many sociological studies, by contrast, consider social network structure as an embodiment of various forms of social capital, including the creation of obligations, information channels, and enforceable trust (Coleman 1988; Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). When firms hire by referral, social network segregation can lead to labor market segregation (Tilly 1998). Various social network structures may arise from the actions of self‐interested individuals (Watts and Strogatz 1998; Jackson 2006); by incorporating concepts of social capital into an economic framework of profit‐maximizing firms, this article develops a model of labor markets in which segregation arises endogenously even though agents are homogeneous and have no dislike for each other. Firms hire through referrals, and can enforce discipline by bribing a referrer to prevent a hiree from getting any outside job offers from other friends if he or she shirks. This is possible only if social networks are reasonably closed, so that the referee knows a majority of his or her friends' friends. By segregating into small communities, workers can more effectively create closed social networks. Social networks with different reservation wages will receive different wages; firms can induce such segregation and wage discrimination in the interest of profit. Workers may not benefit from such segregation, except as a best response to being in a society where it already exists; the “friends” in these social networks act as a worker discipline device, and in this way treat each other inimically.

Where the Girls are: Trade and Labor Market Segregation in Colombia

Where the Girls are: Trade and Labor Market Segregation in Colombia

The Gender Gap in Wages

Explanations of the gender pay gap and related labor market segregation remain fiercely debated. On the one side are those economic historians who take a primarily neoclassical view, in which competition among workers and employers eliminates wage differences that do not reflect productivity and occupational segregation that is not the outcome of choice. Persistent discrimination must reflect anticompetitive institutions, for instance, trade unions. A corollary of the neoclassical perspective is that markets are liberating, freeing agents, including women, from cultural stereotypes and ensuring that they get paid what they are worth, although of course this need not imply wage equality if there are gender differences in productivity. On the other side are those cultural historians who interpret wage differences as reflecting custom and, as far as women are concerned, the cultural deprecation of women's work, while occupational segregation represents gender stereotypes of fit work for women. In this view, socially and culturally constructed gender identities can influence market outcomes, producing discrimination in wages and work that persists even in the face of competitive forces.

The Early‐career Gender Wage Gap among University Graduates in the Finnish Private Sector

AbstractIn the Finnish private sector, the gender wage gap increases significantly during the first 10 years after labour market entry, accounting for most of the lifetime increase in the gender wage differentials. This paper investigates the reasons for this gender difference in early‐career wage development. By focusing on university graduates the paper considers several explanations based on the human capital theory, job mobility, and labour market segregation. The results suggest that only about 20–26 per cent of the average early‐career gender wage gap is explained by gender differences in experience, the field of education, employer characteristics, and mobility. A substantial unexplained gap thus remains. Of the investigated factors gender differences in the field of education and work experience matter most.

Optimal partition of a large labor force into working pairs

Kremer and Maskin (Wage inequality and segregation by skill. Working Paper 5718, National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/papers/w5718, 1996) introduced an idealized model for pairing workers and managers with different skill levels into small teams selected to maximize productivity. They used it to analyze the impact of technological change and widening skill gaps on labor market segregation. The present paper extends their model to a workforce with multidimensional skill types, continuously distributed, and gives a mathematical analysis of the extension. Pure and mixed notions of optimal pairing are introduced, which play an important role in the formulation and analysis of the model. The existence and uniqueness of such pairings are established using techniques from the theory of optimal transportation and infinite-dimensional linear programming.

Gender differences in job separation rates and employment stability: New evidence from employer-employee data

I analyze the job separation process to learn about gender differences in job separation rates and employment stability. An essential finding is that employer-employee data are required to identify gender differences in job separation probabilities because of labor market segregation. Failure to recognize this may potentially lead to statistical discrimination. Three important empirical results are obtained from the analysis. First, women have higher unconditional job separation probabilities. Second, there are no gender differences in job separation probabilities for employees working in similar workplaces. Finally, women's employment stability is relatively low because they are more likely to move from a job and into unemployment or out of the labor force, and less likely to make job-to-job transitions.

Factores que dificultan el acceso de las mujeres a puestos de responsabilidad: una revisión teórica

The general aim of this paper is to review and integrate present research about the different external and internal factors that could hinder the access of women to management positions. Among the external barriers stand out gender stereotypes, labour market segregation, women labour discrimination, sexual harassment, mobbing at work, lower career development opportunities at organization, absence of an integrated labour policy that facilitates the compatibility of work and family areas, and the difficulty to share household and childcare responsibilities. Despite those external determining factors stop many personal and professionally qualified women achieving positions in managerial settings, personal variables can not be ignored, such as low self-efficacy and training in traditionally male issues, since also could change into significant obstacles.

From Mining to Garment Workshops: Bolivian Migrants in Buenos Aires

Based on case-study material from Bolivian migration to Argentina, this article analyses the ways in which gender and ethnicity influence niche formation by exploring the role of social networks. It starts by making the link between niche formation and social networks, before analysing the ways in which migrants’ labour market insertion in Argentina is gendered. Migrants’ life stories and a survey of a community of ex-miners show that a higher proportion of women than men work in the Argentine garment sector. The data also show that migrant women and men do not have equal access to social networks. However, this unequal access does not, in itself, fully explain women's greater clustering in garment work. Rather, the article suggests that labour market segregation and the articulation of gender, class and ethnicity, as well as migration status, provide women with few alternatives.

Niches, Labour Market Segregation, Ethnicity and Gender

The topic of this JEMS special issue is how the formation of ethnic niches is gendered. We combine theories on niching with those on gendered labour market segregation and show that there are similarities in the underlying processes and explanations. The interaction between niching and gendered labour market segregation takes place at four points. In the first place, entrepreneurship is less of an option for immigrant women than it is for immigrant men. Yet, in some sectors, immigrant women have more options for entrepreneurship than they had in their countries of origin. Their participation in the niche, as workers or as entrepreneurs, strengthens the niche and ensures its continuity. Secondly, women's participation in some niches leads to demands for highly flexible child-care and thus the development of a further niche. In the third place, the concentration of immigrant women in domestic work takes shape as a niche, especially as this sector becomes more ethnicised. The domestic sector, furthermore, is divided into sub-sectors, which leads to niching within a niche. Niches—including domestic work—offer an environment that is regarded as safe, and near to the private sphere. Fourthly, earlier studies have shown how the labour market is divided into a primary and a secondary segment. In the first segment, jobs are fixed and there is a career perspective. In the second, work is flexible and there is no career progression. Immigrants and women are more often found in the second segment. Research presented here indicates that work that is generally regarded as women's work proves also to be accessible to immigrant men. This implies that segregation occurs less between sexes and more between the second and the first segment of the labour market.

Gender and ethnic minority exclusion from skilled occupations in construction: a Western European comparison

Women and ethnic minorities remain seriously underrepresented in skilled construction occupations despite European Union policy to overcome labour market segregation and despite their increasing participation in the economy‐wide labour market. The paper seeks to account for differences in female and ethnic minority/migrant participation in both the deregulated, craft‐based construction industries of Italy and Spain and, to an extent, Britain and in the regulated industrial and training‐based industries of Denmark and the Netherlands. The authors found that the only entry route for women is to obtain formal qualifications, with the Dutch and Danish education and training systems being especially pivotal to inclusion. Those from ethnic minorities and recent migrants, whilst proportionately overrepresented in Italy and Spain, face more vertical segregation in being largely confined to the bottom of the job ladder. Key obstacles confronted by both groups are the opportunity to undertake work‐based training, output‐based wage systems, informal methods of recruitment and lack of proactive implementation of equal opportunities policies. The conclusion drawn is that European and national authorities and social partners need to address equality of access and of employment conditions to ensure that regulation overcomes exclusion.

Agency Versus Structure: Path Dependency and Choice in Low-Wage Labor Markets

The growing preponderance of low-wage work in America challenges the dual mission of Human Resource Development Practitioners to foster individual and organizational learning and performance. In the prevailing discourse of the learning society, individual success and mobility are available to all who assume personal responsibility and agency in the labor market. A competing discourse posits that the emerging structure of work disadvantages a growing number of workers, leading to labor market segregation and significant economic disparity. The author argues that both agency and structure interact in low-wage labor markets to create and limit opportunity for workers. The aim of this article is to locate the learning challenges faced by low-wage workers and their employers and to explore what Human Resource Development Practitioners can do to mitigate the growth of low-wage work and its individual and social consequences.