Occupational Gender Composition and Wages in Canada: 1987-1988

The relationship between occupational gender composition and wages is the basis of pay equity/comparable worth legislation. A number of previous studies have examined this relationship in US data, identifying some of the determinants of low wages in ``female jobs'' well as important limitations of public policy in this area. There is little evidence, however, from other jurisdictions. This omission is particularly disturbing in the case of Canada, which now has some of the most extensive pay equity legislation in the world. In this paper we provide a comprehensive picture, circa the late 1980's, of the occupational gender segregation in Canada and its consequences for wages. The sample period precedes many provincial pay equity initiatives and thus the results should provide a baseline for the evaluation of this legislation. We find that the estimated wage penalties in female jobs in Canada are generally much smaller than the estimates for the United States. Although there is some heterogeneity across worker groups on average, the link between female wages and gender composition is small and not statistically significant.

Occupational Gender Segregation and Women's Wages in Canada: An Historical Perspective

We document the evolution of occupational gender segregation and its implications for women's labour market outcomes over the twentieth century. The first half of the century saw a considerable decline in vertical segregation as women moved out of domestic and manufacturing work into clerical work. This created a substantial amount of horizontal segregation that persists to this day. To study the effects of occupational segregation on the gender gap, we introduce a decomposition technique that divides the gap into between-occupation and within-occupation components. Since the 1990s the component attributable to within-occupation wage differentials has become predominant. Nous traçons un portrait de l'évolution de la ségrégation professionnelle selon le sexe au 20ième siècle, et de ses conséquences sur la condition féminine dans le marché du travail. Dans la première partie du 20ième siècle, la ségrégation professionnelle hiérarchique ou verticale a considérablement déclinée alors que les travailleuses quittaient les emplois de domestique et du secteur manufacturier en faveur des emplois de bureau. Ceci créa néanmoins une importante ségrégation professionnelle horizontale qui persiste jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Pour étudier les effets de la ségrégation professionnelle sur l'écart salarial selon le sexe, nous présentons une technique de décomposition qui divise l'écart salarial en deux composantes: l'une due aux différences intra-occupations et l'autre due aux différences inter-occupations. Depuis le début des années 90, la composante intra-occupation est prédominante.Occupational segregation, gender wage gap, pay equity, economic history, Ségrégation professionnelle, équité salariale, écart salarial selon le sexe, histoire économique

L’impact des règles de prêts hypothécaires sur l’offre de travail des femmes au Canada : évidence paramétrique et non paramétrique

Cet article utilise des statistiques descriptives, des régressions flexibles de type noyau et des modèles à formes réduites pour montrer que des variables reliées aux conditions hypothécaires, en particulier une variable qui capture les exigences de revenu relatives aux prêts hypothécaires, ont un impact important sur l’offre de travail des femmes au Canada. Dans un modèle à formes réduites du nombre de semaines travaillées par l’épouse, l’impact positif de cette contrainte à l’emprunt excède l’effet négatif de la variable enfants d’âge préscolaire. Ce résultat ne peut être attribué à un problème d’endogénéité des variables hypothécaires. En effet, on ne peut rejeter l’exogénéité faible de la variable qui capture le test du revenu de la procédure d’accès au prêt hypothécaire, lorsqu’on utilise une procédure à deux étapes qui se sert des résidus généralisés pour effectuer un test de spécification à la Hausman.This paper use descriptive statistics, kernel regressions and reduced-form analyses to show that mortgage related variables, in particular a variable believed to capture the earnings test of mortgage lending rules, have an important impact on the labor supply of married women in Canada. In a reduced-form weeks-worked equation for wives, the positive impact of the earnings test is shown to exceed the negative effect of young children. This result cannot be attributed to the potential endogeneity of mortgage variables since it is not possible to reject the weak exogeneity of the earnings test using a two-stage procedure that relies on generalized residuals to perform a Hausman type specification test

Occupational Tasks and Changes in the Wage Structure

This paper argues that changes in the returns to occupational tasks have contributed to changes in the wage distribution over the last three decades. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we first show that the 1990s polarization of wages is explained by changes in wage setting between and within occupations, which are well captured by tasks measures linked to technological change and offshorability. Using a decomposition based on Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009), we find that technological change and deunionization played a central role in the 1980s and 1990s, while offshorability became an important factor from the 1990s onwards.wage inequality, polarization, occupational tasks, offshoring, RIF-regressions

Unconditional Quantile Regressions

We propose a new regression method to estimate the impact of explanatory variables on quantiles of the unconditional distribution of an outcome variable. The proposed method consists of running a regression of the (recentered) influence function (RIF) of the unconditional quantile on the explanatory variables. The influence function is a widely used tool in robust estimation that can easily be computed for each quantile of interest. We show how standard partial effects, as well as policy effects, can be estimated using our regression approach. We propose three different regression estimators based on a standard OLS regression (RIFOLS), a Logit regression (RIF-Logit), and a nonparametric Logit regression (RIFNP). We also discuss how our approach can be generalized to other distributional statistics besides quantiles.Influence Functions, Unconditional Quantile, Quantile Regressions.

Occupational Gender Segregation and Women's Wages in Canada: An Historical Perspective

Nous traçons un portrait de l'évolution de la ségrégation professionnelle selon le sexe au 20ième siècle, et de ses conséquences sur la condition féminine dans le marché du travail. Dans la première partie du 20ième siècle, la ségrégation professionnelle hiérarchique ou verticale a considérablement déclinée alors que les travailleuses quittaient les emplois de domestique et du secteur manufacturier en faveur des emplois de bureau. Ceci créa néanmoins une importante ségrégation professionnelle horizontale qui persiste jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Pour étudier les effets de la ségrégation professionnelle sur l'écart salarial selon le sexe, nous présentons une technique de décomposition qui divise l'écart salarial en deux composantes: l'une due aux différences intra-occupations et l'autre due aux différences inter-occupations. Depuis le début des années 90, la composante intra-occupation est prédominante.We document the evolution of occupational gender segregation and its implications for women's labour market outcomes over the twentieth century. The first half of the century saw a considerable decline in vertical segregation as women moved out of domestic and manufacturing work into clerical work. This created a substantial amount of horizontal segregation that persists to this day. To study the effects of occupational segregation on the gender gap, we introduce a decomposition technique that divides the gap into between-occupation and within-occupation components. Since the 1990s the component attributable to within-occupation wage differentials has become predominant

Does Comparable Worth Work in a Decentralized Labor Market?

We investigate the effect of pro-active comparable worth legislation---covering both the public and private sectors---on wages, the gender wage gap and the gender composition of employment. The focus is the pay equity initiative of the Canadian province of Ontario in the early 1990s. We document substantial lapses in compliance and problems with the implementation of the law among smaller firms where the majority of men and women work. This evidence provides important lessons of the obstacles to extending pay equity to the private sector of a decentralized labor market. When we focus on those sectors of the labor market where compliance was relatively strict, our results suggest that any positive effects on the wages of women in female jobs were very modest. Our most consistently estimated effects of the law on wages are negative: slower wage growth for women in male jobs and for men in female jobs.

Women's Wages in Women's Work: A US/Canada Comparison of the Roles of Unions and Public Goods Sector Jobs

In this paper, we investigate the mechanism by which the femaleness of occupations has a negative effect on women's wages. We relate US/Canada differences in labor market institutions, the returns to skills and other dimensions of the wage structure, such as occupational rents, to corresponding differences in the rewards to female jobs. Our analysis, which uses US data from the CPS-ORG for 1988 and Canadian data from the 1988 LMAS, uncovers intriguing US/Canada differences in the effect of occupational gender composition on women's wages. The estimated effect for Canadian women is generally small and not statistically significant, while estimates for American women are relatively large and comparable to the evidence in previous studies. Relating these differences to cross-country variation in other wage determinants reveals that higher rates of unionization, and the higher occupation wage effects for certain public good sector jobs such as educational services, work to the advantage of Canadian women. We also find that the relatively higher pay of integrated jobs in the United States helps account for the larger negative effect of gender composition on women's wages in this country. Dans cet article, nous étudions le mécanisme par lequel le taux de féminité des occupations peut avoir un effect négatif sur les salaires des femmes. Nous utilisons une comparaison internationale États-Unis/Canada pour relier les différences institutionnelles du marché du travail, les différences dans les rendements des qualifications et dans d'autres dimensions de la structure salariale, comme les rentes occupationnelles, à des différences dans la rémunération des emplois à prédominance féminine. Notre analyse, qui utilise les données américaines provenant des CPS-ORG pour 1988 et les données canadiennes provenant de l'enquête sur l'activité aussi pour 1988, démontre l'existence de différences intéressantes entre les États-Unis et le Canada quant à l'effet du taux de féminité des occupations sur les salaires des femmes. L'effet estimé pour les canadiennes, dans leur ensemble, est généralement petit et n'est pas statistiquement significatif, alors que l'effet estimé pour les américaines est relativement important et comparable aux résultats des études antérieures. Lorsque nous relions ces différences internationales aux autres déterminants de la structure salariale, nous trouvons que les taux de syndication relativement élevés, et les effets fixes relativement élevés des occupations procurant des biens publics sont à l'avantage des canadiennes. Nous trouvons aussi que les salaires relativement plus élevés des occupations intégrées aux États-Unis contribuent à l'effet négatif du taux de féminité des occupations sur les salaires des femmes dans ce pays.Pay equity, comparable worth, public sector jobs, gender composition, cross-country comparison, Équité salariale, salaire égal pour travail de valeur comparable, taux de féminité occupationnel, emplois publics, syndicats, comparaisons internationales

Occupational Gender Composition and Wages in Canada: 1987-1988

No Abstract.

Gender Composition and Wages: Why is Canada different from the United States?

The correlation of occupational gender composition and wages is the basis of pay equity/comparable worth legislation. A number of previous studies have examined this correlation in US data, identifying some of the determinants of low wages in ``female jobs'', as well as important limitations of public policy in this area. There is little evidence, however, from other jurisdictions. This omission is particularly disturbing in the case of Canada, which now has some of the most extensive pay equity legislation in the world. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive picture, circa the late 1980's, of the occupational gender segregation in Canada and its consequences for wages. We also draw explicit comparisons of our findings to evidence for the United States. We find that the link between female wages and gender composition is much stronger in the United States than in Canada, where it is generally small and not statistically significant. The relatively more advantageous position of women in female jobs in Canada is found to be linked to higher unionization rates and the industry-wage effects of ``public goods'' sectors.