Name: Max Weber Lecture by Barbara Petrongolo (Queen Mary University London), 18 January 2017
Uploaded: 2020-03-13T07:31:02.000Z
Duration: 1 h 5 min 22 s
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The second conditional

I'm gonna cover recent and historical trends, new perspectives in the discipline and also discuss policy options.

So women's involvement in the labor market has been one of the most important changes off the past century on this change has involved many aspect off the labor market.

So women have made very important in drugs in all dimensions of labor markets that has bean convergence in employment rates.

We respect to Ben convergence in earnings and also very important changes in the type of jobs on the commission that men and women do.

Despite this kind of very broad gender convergence, there are still important and persistent disparities between men and women in the labor market.

So to give you a very simple piece of data in the UK these days, women earn about 22% less than men and they're 12% points less likely to be in work in the U.

The statistics are very similar to the UK, very big gender gaps and kind of smaller employment gaps in continental Europe.

The Petri sort of reversed the gender pay gap is smaller, but the gender employment gap is a lot larger.

So there are very big disparities in both prices on quantities between women and men in labor markets.

Which is kind of surprising because this is happening after decades off equalized education opportunities on equal pay legislation.

So this is a little bit the kind of framework in which I'm going to talk today.

The questions that I'm going to address today are sort off to be questions Festival The good news.

The good side of it, what are the factors that East female entry into the labor market and, secondly, sort of the not so good news?

What are the factors that still hinder the full convergence between men and women in the workplace?

Now off course, as always, in economics and social sciences, we always need to ask, Why do we care?

Is it something that we should care about?

And then I'm going to give you a very simple answer to that is probably simplistic answer.

We should care about it because men and women are equally productive.

If anything, girls these days invest more than boys in education.

They perform better in school, them boys.

And therefore, if the efficient allocation of workers to jobs requires that people are matched to the jobs that maximize the returns to their skills, there is really no point in selecting predominately from John one gender.

I suppose that from two genders, because they're strictly oneself to restrict from the male pool.

Very simplistic about it, basically means that on average, the kind of people that we can select for a given job is of worst qualities, so that much quality would be worse.

So there is an issue of really efficient allocation off individuals, two jobs, really ensuring the men and women have equal assessed to labor markets.

Okay, a very simple answer to a huge question.

Yes, there is a problem if men and women's opportunities are not equalized.

As I said, this is a sort off, simple way to see that there's lots of caverns that are being discussed, even in research these days, to this kind of you.

First of all, educational attainment is equalized in terms of quantity, years of schooling, but certainly not in terms of quality So these days, girls on boys are still choosing different tracks and education on Does that happen?

And secondly, if we're really serious about talking off economic efficiency, we should also take into account preferences, not only productivity.

And if we don't take into account preferences, we should really be asking ourselves to men and women have the same preferences or not.

So I'm going to be talking about a number off this aspect.

So the outline off the talk is first of all, starting from the facts.

I will talk about historical trends in education, labor, market on earnings.

Secondly, I will be talking about forces that works, explaining this trends and finally, the factors that underlie the remaining disparities in the labor market.

So the facts I will start from education.

I was saying before that these days there is no reason to believe that women are less productive than man, and this is probably the main reason behind that.

So this figure gives you the college graduation rates in the U.

For, uh, by the age of 35 four people board between 18 70 in 1980.

So as you can see here at the very beginning of the sample period, late 19th century early 19 early 20th century, very few people were graduating among either men or women, so 5% graduation rate almost equal across genders.

Then, in the interwar period, educational attainment of both males and women started to increase extremely rapidly.

But as you can see, Mae's graduation rate very quickly surpassed, with females graduation right by a big chunk.

So between, say, 19 10th cohort on 1955 90 60 cohort man graduation rate were significantly higher than women's graduation rates.

Oh, man, we're investing in education a lot more than females.

But then, with the baby boom go horse, this gap actually reversed on in current cohorts female.

Her more likely to graduate from college in the US than that man.

And then they used to be before, of course, so there is absolutely no gender gap.

If anything, there is a reverse gender gap in favor for Mays in the rates of education.

So this figure here is a snapshot off Corrine graduation rates among relatively young workers 25 to 34.

So this is for 2014 or most recent available data, and this is basically a cross section of a very large number of Voice City countries in these countries.

The sort of orange bars represent the graduation rate from college for men, and the blue diamonds represent the graduation rate for college for Sorry, they're Orange Line is for women on the Blue Diamonds is for men, as you can see everywhere except in a very small handful of countries like Switzerland.

Women are more likely to graduate from college than men everywhere in the city.

Okay, now, this is really about the quantity off years of schooling, the probability to graduate from college If one looks so what women and men doing college.

Indeed, there are important disparities there.

So this picture here represents the fraction off female graduates and may graduates in heart sciences.

So here I am, talking about science, mathematics and computing.

So what is the distribution off men and women in the total number of graduates in this disciplines?

Because these are really the disciplines that tend to be associate ID with higher earnings in the labor market.

Okay, so that's processing that That That's the only reason why I'm looking for the moment that this discipline here.

So as you can see here, except again in a very small group off no representative countries here everywhere in the U.

City women are much less likely than men to graduate from Stan subjects from hiring sort of majors.

Okay, so this is the sort off educational snapshots.

I'm gonna give you some data on the employment rate of women, which is basically the proportion of employed women over the total working age population in the U.

These sample starts at the beginning of the 20 century between the beginning of the century.

On the start of World War two, the employment rate of women is extremely low between 20 and 25% on also relatively stable, relatively stagnant with war war two after World War two, there's been a huge ramp up on this huge acceleration of female employment from 25% to nearly 70% in the 19 nineties, and then he has completely plateau or even slightly reversed after that.

But in ST in, say, 50 years between 1940 1990 female employment went from 25% to about 70%.

These are six big European countries, so it's France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

The red line here represents again the end the World War two.

As you can see after the end of World War Two, this country's look like each other a lot.

There's bean, an increasing training female participation in all these countries.

The levers were somewhat different, and in particular.

For example, if you compare, for example, Spain and the U.

K, you can see that the trend is a lot steeper than staying that in the UK, because in Spain, the sort off beginning level of female employment after World War two was a little lower than in the UK, So there's also been some sort of cross counter convergence in female employment rate, but very clear.

I'm positive trends after World War Two, this is Scandinavia, even more the transit some Scandinavian countries have been extremely steep, like, for example, Norway and Sweden on the levers are also very different from the rest of Europe.

So, for example, if you compare Sweden and Norway to southern European countries, you see that these days women have unemployment rate in Sweden and Norway of about 80% while it's only 50 to 60% for example, in Italy and Spain.

Another very important takeaway point from those graphs is that this sustained increase in female employment rates that we have observed since World War Two is not really a sort of historical necessity before World War Two.

And this is the reason why I put a sort of red line divide.

Before that, the experience in this country's was relatively different.

So in many countries, female employment friends were kind of flat or even decreasing.

For example, like in the Netherlands, in Italy, in the UK and in some Scandinavian countries, too, this is the so called U shape pattern in female participation.

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Max Weber Lecture by Barbara Petrongolo (Queen Mary University London), 18 January 2017

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