Gender stereotyping and wage discrimination among Italian graduates

This paper addresses the gender pay gap among Italian university graduates on entry to the labour market and stresses the importance of gender stereotypes on subjective assessment of individual productivity. Our data show that in contexts where the stereotype is most likely to occur, the unexplained component of the gender pay gap is higher. Moreover, we find evidence that being excellent at school does not ensures that a woman will be rewarded as an equivalently performing man, but serves to counteract the gender bias in on-the-job evaluations

Gender stereotyping and wage discrimination among Italian graduates

This paper addresses the gender pay gap among Italian university graduates on entry to the labour market and stresses the importance of gender stereotypes on subjective assessment of individual productivity. Our data show that in contexts where the stereotype is most likely to occur, the unexplained component of the gender pay gap is higher. Moreover, we find evidence that being excellent at school does not ensures that a woman will be rewarded as an equivalently performing man, but serves to counteract the gender bias in on-the-job evaluations.

The Gender Gap in Academic Achievements of Italian Graduates

We analyse the academic performance of Italian students who graduated in 2004, and their occupational status and earnings in 2007. We find that the educational and occupational performances of male and female students do differ: girls outperform boys in academic achievement, but male graduates outperform female graduates in labour market outcomes. One could wonder why female students put more effort into educational performance than male students, given that they will receive lower wages. We find a rationale for this choice in the higher marginal return that female students gain from their higher grades. We address our empirical analysis to four points: first, we show that, for the most part, the difference in educational performance is explained by the diversity in unobserved characteristics between male and female students. Second, we provide empirical evidence that the amount of effort supplied is the key determinant of the unobserved characteristics. Third, we argue that female students study hardly because they gain a higher marginal return from success in educational competition. Fourth, as this finding may be consistent with both human capital and sorting models of education, we test the hypothesis that female students use their higher grades to signal their ability to potential employers.

Self employment among Italian female graduates

Purpose: To investigate the gender impact of tertiary education on the probability of entering and remaining in self employment. Design/methodology/approach: We exploit a data set on labour market flows produced by the Italian National Statistical Office by interviewing about 62,000 graduate and non graduate individuals in transition between five labour market states: Dependent workers; Self-Employed workers; Unemployed persons; Non active persons. From these data we constructed an average ten-year transition matrix (1993-2003) and investigated the flows between labour market conditions by applying Markovian analysis. Findings: Our data show that education significantly increases the probability of entering self employment for both male and female graduates, but it also significantly increases the transition from self employment to dependent employment for female graduates, thereby increasing the percentage of female graduates in paid employment and reducing the percentage of women in entrepreneurial activities. We argue that the disappointment provoked by the gender wage gap in paid employment may induce some female graduates with low entrepreneurial ability to set up on their own, but once in self employment they have lower survival rates than both men in self employment and women in paid employment. Thus, what we observe overall, is that education widens the gender gap between self employed workers and employees for individuals persisting in the same working condition. Originality/value: Our data enable us to shift the focus of the relationship between education and entrepreneurship from the probability of being self employed to the probability of entering and surviving in this condition.

Gender stereotyping and wage discrimination among Italian graduates

This paper addresses the gender pay gap among Italian university graduates on entry to the labour market and stresses the importance of gender stereotypes on subjective assessment of individual productivity. Our data show that in contexts where the stereotype is most likely to occur, the unexplained component of the gender pay gap is higher. Moreover, we find evidence that being excellent at school does not ensures that a woman will be rewarded as an equivalently performing man, but serves to counteract the gender bias in on-the-job evaluationsLabour market; Italy; Gender pay gap; Education; Stereotypes

Who skims the cream of the Italian graduate crop? Wage-employment versus self-employment

This paper tests whether the academic achievement is a significant determinant of the employment status in the Italian labor market: are the new entrepreneurs selected from the top or bottom end of the graduates ability distribution? Is the cream of the graduate crop pulled into selfemployment by the higher expected earnings or are the individuals with lower degree score pushed into entrepreneurship by poor alternatives? Our data show a strong negative relation between academic achievement and self-employment status, i.e. we assess the skimming of the best graduates into wage and salary work.

Educational Performance as Signalling Device: Evidence from Italy

Following Brown and Sessions (1999) we apply the comparative techniques originated by Wolpin (1977) and Psacharopoulos (1979) to discriminate between the weak and strong screening hypotheses. Our data provides additional empirical results for the Italian labour market shifting the focus of the relationship between education and wages from the highest level of education completed to more specific measurements like degree score and completion speed. Our results show that the strong screening hypothesis is strengthened, i. e. that educational performance has an insignificant return for the self-employed, but a significantly positive return for employees.

Shortening university career fades the signal away. Evidence from Italy.

Italian university system was reformed in 2001. This paper tests the screening role of degree scores for 2004-Italian graduates. We find support of the strong screening hypothesis for prereform type degrees, while we do not find any evidence of signalling effects for post-reform 3-years degrees. We gauge that the shutting down of the signal can be partially ascribed to the poor quality of students who obtained a 3-years degree without taking any further education.Screening, Italy, Higher Education

The reversal of the gender pay gap among public-contestselected young employees

This paper analyzes the effect of public-contest recruitment on earnings by applying an extended version of the Oaxaca-Blinder model with double selection to microdata on Italy. We find that the gender pay gap vanishes among public-contest selected employees, and even reverses in favor of women (-17.4%) in the young sample. The reversal is because public contests are merit-based and gender-fair screening devices. They are merit-based because selected employees possess higher productive characteristics than unselected ones, both women and men. They are gender-fair because the coefficients component in the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is never significant among public-contest recruited employees, either with or without selection. On the contrary, among employees not hired by public contest the gender pay gap is positive and significant (7.6%), and it is entirely due to coefficients, that is to discrimination in the career path

Changes in the gender pay gap over time: the case of West Germany

AbstractUsing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyzes changes in the gender pay gap in West Germany between 1984 and 2020. The literature generally observes a catching-up of women over time with a slowdown since the mid-1990s and often concentrates on the USA. We present both an aggregate and detailed decomposition of changes in wages allowing us to directly test for changes in the components of the decomposition across gender and time. Apart from standard OLS, we use linear unconditional quantile regressions in order to be able to take changes in the gap and its components at the mean and across the distribution into account. We find that the gender pay gap statistically significantly declined at the bottom and the middle, while it increased at the top of the wage distribution. These results suggest that glass ceiling is a major challenge to the West German labour market