Project Details
Projekt
Gender Gaps in the Labour Market: The Role of Skills, Implicit Biases and Task Allocation
Subject Area
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518302089
Although the academic literature on the causes of gender gaps in the labor market is extensive, knowledge about how skills and skill mismatch, gendered task divisions, social norms and implicit gender biases contribute to the gender wage gap and other gender gaps on the labor market is still limited. This project contributes to our understanding of the extent and sources of those gaps and biases, and how to overcome them to alleviate labor scarcity and skill mismatch. The project will address these literature gaps by providing new quasi- and survey-experimental insights using German as well as international data from OECD countries. The research will investigate the role of family policies such as parental leave and public child care (and their interaction) as well as the importance of cultural differences, e.g. in social norms. The research is structured in three parts. The first part aims to provide first evidence on the gendered impact of parenthood on subsequent skill development and skill mismatch. Utilizing international PIAAC data, the research combines pseudo-event with quasi-experimental techniques to estimate child penalties in cognitive and non-cognitive adult skills. The project will leverage policy reforms across countries and over child-birth cohorts within countries to investigate the role of parental leave and child care policies. The importance of social norms will also be explored. The second part aims to foster our understanding of how implicit gender biases are related to parenthood status and age. Combining existing and newly collected data from factorial survey experiments, the research aims to investigate how gaps in the justice perceptions of wages for women versus menare affected by family status and the number of children. Moreover, we will analyze potential differences in implicit gender biases over time. Finally, the research will provide insights about implicit biases in the general population (collected as part of the Innovation Sample of the Socio-Economic Panel) as well as in a sample of employers (ifo Human Resource Manager Panel) The third part investigates the unequal task division between women and men as potential contributor of gender wages gaps. This research will advance our knowledge of why women tend to provide more public goods and perform over proportionally lower-paying non-promotable tasks than men. Building on large-scale online experiments in five European countries, the research will analyze the mechanisms behind this unequal task division in the work place and at home. Collectively, this project aims to contribute new insights into the causes of gender gaps in the labor market with respect to skills, implicit biases and gendered task divisions and to discuss the potential for policy interventions in these dimensions.
DFG Programme
Research Units
