Panel:
Gender in the Workplace
(Social Equity)
Saturday, November 14, 2015: 10:15 AM-11:45 AM
Tuttle South (Hyatt Regency Miami)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Panel Organizers: Jeffrey Zax, University of Colorado - Boulder
Panel Chairs: Donna Ginther, University of Kansas
Discussants: Misty L. Heggeness, National Institutes of Health and Terra McKinnish, University of Colorado, Boulder
The theme of this panel is the question of why male and female labor market experiences differ. The papers in this panel offer differences in values, noncognitive skills and occupational choice as potential answers.
Greenbaum, Dormady and Young begin with demonstrated differences across genders in risk-aversion. They explore whether, as a consequence of these differences, firms with more female management participation are more likely to adopt “resilience” strategies, strategies that anticipate the possibility of negative business shocks.
Blume-Kohout shares the Greenbaum, Dormady and Young interest in value differences across genders. She measures differences in personal values and the relative importance of job attributes for the purpose of understanding the differential participation of men and women in STEM occupations.
Petre echoes the Blume-Kohout interest in differences across genders both in attitudes and in occupational choice. She augments measures of differences across genders for an array of different attitudes towards work with differences in non-cognitive skills. She expands the focus to gendered occupations throughout the economy, and additionally explores the male-female wage gap.
The interest in gendered occupations and male-female wage gaps reappears in Zax and Ulrich. They examine how that gap evolves in occupations with different degrees of gender segregation as a consequence of comparable worth policies.
In sum, these four papers provide complementary, yet distinct analyses of male-female labor market differentials. These analyses begin with differences across genders in values and attitudes, procede through the consequent differences in occupational choice to address, in the end, determinants of the gender gap in incomes.
