Gender gaps in unemployment rates in OECD countries

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment rate is substantially above the male. Although it is easy to give plausible reasons for why more women than men may decide not to want work, it is not so obvious why, once they have decided they want a job, women in some countries are less likely to be in employment than men. This is the subject of this paper. We show that, in countries where there is a large gender gap in unemployment rates, there is a gender gap in both flows from employment into unemployment and from unemployment into employment. We investigate different hypotheses about the sources of these gaps. Most hypotheses find little support in the data and the gender gap in unemployment rates (like the gender gap in pay) remains largely unexplained. But it does seem to correlate with attitudes on whether men are more deserving of work than women so that discrimination against women may explain part of the gender gap in unemployment rates in the Mediterranean countries

Cracked but not broken: the continued gender gap in senior administrative positions

Equality for women (and men) was enshrined in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Legislatively this has meant that women have been treated in the same way as men, and post-feminist theory suggests that equality battles have been won and that women and men now have equal opportunities. However, when looking into the attainment of women in HE, the concept of equal opportunities seems questionable. Female administrative staff have outnumbered male administrative staff in universities for at least sixteen years. However, there is still an unbalanced gender profile at senior, ie above G9 (spine point >51 on the new single pay framework [UCU 2004]). If for professional managers at levels below that of Grade 10 women outweigh men by on average 62% why at levels at G10 and above do women represent on average only 30% of staff

The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs

Using the ExecuComp data set, which contains information on the five highest-paid executives in each of a large number of U.S. firms for the years 1992–97, the authors examine the gender compensation gap among high-level executives. Women, who represented about 2.5% of the sample, earned about 45% less than men. As much as 75% of this gap can be explained by the fact that women managed smaller companies and were less likely to be CEO, Chair, or company President. The unexplained gap falls to less than 5% with an allowance for the younger average age and lower average seniority of the female executives. These results do not rule out the possibility of discrimination via gender segregation or unequal promotion. Between 1992 and 1997, however, women nearly tripled their participation in the top executive ranks and also strongly improved their relative compensation, mostly by gaining representation in larger corporations

Vehicle-related crime and the gender gap

Although vehicle-related offending and traffic offenders are of interest to some behavioural psychologists, criminologists have been less enthused and their concern has been largely restricted to crime to vehicles rather than crime by drivers or wider society. Both disciplines have, however, largely ignored the contribution of women to vehicle-related offending statistics, mirroring the pattern seen in regard to mainstream offending. This paper attempts to plug the gap by considering the relative contributions of men and women to motoring conviction data and self-report offending studies. To some extent it also does this by age, where evidence for a ‘ladette’ style of driving among young women is examined from the conviction data. In general, a gender gap similar to that in mainstream crime is noted, and key theoretical explanations that could account for this are assembled. Implications for improving road safety and research are then considered given this gap and emerging support for the non-homogeneity of female driving styles

Bridging the Gender Gap: Tackling Women's Inequality

Launched at the Plan International Because I am a Girl campaign launch event in New York City held on October 11, 2012 (the inaugural UN International Day of the Girl Child), this publication explores the issue of gender equality - something that remains elusive in many parts of the world, but is vital for economic growth and development of society

Gender gap in the ERASMUS mobility program

Studying abroad has become very popular among students. The ERASMUS mobility program is one of the largest international student exchange programs in the world, which has supported already more than three million participants since 1987. We analyzed the mobility pattern within this program in 2011-12 and found a gender gap across countries and subject areas. Namely, for almost all participating countries, female students are over-represented in the ERASMUS program when compared to the entire population of tertiary students. The same tendency is observed across different subject areas. We also found a gender asymmetry in the geographical distribution of hosting institutions, with a bias of male students in Scandinavian countries. However, a detailed analysis reveals that this latter asymmetry is rather driven by subject and consistent with the distribution of gender ratios among subject areas

Closing the Gender Gap in Education: Making a Difference in Math and Science Classrooms

This study presents research that was conducted in the Sandhills Region of North Carolina. In particular, the study involves focus group questionnaires that were distributed to two high schools within the Sandhills Region. The primary objective of the study is to establish an understanding of the difference between male students’ and female students’ perceptions of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses and career pathways, as this will provide further evidence to suggest how educational leaders, teachers, and university teacher-education programs can work toward closing the gender gap in education. The literature review and results sections will provide substantive evidence to suggest that progress is being made in the way of closing the gender gap, but this process remains ongoing in the twenty-first century

The Ongoing Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships

In a 2014 report, AAMD and the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) found that a gender gap existed in art museum directorships. We found that women held less than half of directorships, that the average female director's salary lagged behind that of the average male director, and that these phenomena were most persistent in the largest museums. Three years later, despite press attention and field-wide dialogue on the topic, the gender gap persists, although trends showing incremental gains in some areas of pay and employment representation deserve recognition

Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county's or town's distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.Protestantism, education, gender gap

Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in 19th Century Prussia

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county’s or town’s distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.gender gap, education, Protestantism