Gender pay gaps in domestic and foreign-owned firms

We investigate differences in gender wage gaps between foreign-owned and domestically owned firms in Poland, a country that has experienced large FDI inflows over the past three decades. We show that the adjusted gender wage gaps are larger among employees working in the foreign-owned sector than in the domestic sector. The gender pay gaps are found to be larger in the foreign-owned companies than in the domestically owned firms at every decile of the wage distribution, with the largest disparities being observed at the bottom and at the top. Our findings also show that in the foreign-owned sector, the returns to individual, job, and firm characteristics earned by women are much lower than the returns earned by men, but that the foreign-owned firms appear to pay higher firm-specific wage premia to women than to men, thereby narrowing within-firm gender wage inequality. These patterns differ from those observed in the domestic sector, in which firm wage premia tend to widen within-firm wage distributions, and contribute to the overall level of gender wage inequality.

Is Occupational Licensing More Beneficial for Women than for Men? The Case of Germany, 1993/2015

This article analyzes the relation of gender wage inequality to occupational licensing in Germany in 1993 and 2015. We show that the very particular German licensing system and strong gender segregation lead to an overrepresentation of women in licensed occupations. We further investigate, whether both genders benefit equally from licensing in terms of wages. Finally, we study whether both women’s overrepresentation and potential gender gaps within licensed occupations help to explain patterns in the overall gender wage gap. To this end, we distinguish licensed occupations in professions and semi-professions. We use 1993 and 2015 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study to apply repeated cross-sectional regressions and decompositions. Our findings suggest that women benefited more from licensing in 1993 than in 2015. Men’s wage premiums seem to increase over time, but women’s premiums do not. We also show that semi-professions are less rewarding and women are overrepresented in these occupations. Finally, increased demand for licensed occupations is an important contribution to narrowing the gender wage gap. Women’s increased employment in licensed occupations alone would have reduced the overall gender wage gap by roughly 8 per cent.

The gender wage gap in the workplace: Does the age of the firm matter?

We contribute to the literature on firm-level determinants of gender wage inequality by studying the link between a firm’s age and the size of its gender pay gap. Using European Structure of Earnings data for eight European countries, we find that in all these countries, the gender wage gaps are smallest in the youngest firms. Our results also show that in Central European countries, the size of the gender pay gap clearly increases with the age of the company; whereas in the older EU member states such link is not as apparent. Levels of gender wage inequality appear to be highest in companies that were previously state owned but were privatized during the transition. We interpret our findings with the support of competition and monopsony theories.