J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor DiscriminationReturn

This study uses data from the 2012 China Labour-Force Dynamics Survey and 2010-2012 China Family Panel Studies to investigate job satisfaction and job expectations, as well as the association between job satisfaction and job turnover by gender among employees aged 16-65. We find not only that job satisfaction levels are relatively low, with only 46% of workers explicitly satisfied, but also that worker expectations differ significantly from what their jobs actually provide. In particular, many jobs are less interesting than expected, which prevents workers from realizing their perceived potential. This expectation gap is thus a strong determinant of job satisfaction. Men and women have similar levels of job satisfaction, yet based on observables, one would expect women's job satisfaction to be lower than it actually is, thereby lending support to the gender-job-satisfaction paradox encountered in Western studies. In contrast to Western research, we find no link between job satisfaction and job change, an observation we attribute to China's unique Confucian-based work ethic.

There is still a significant gender wage gap on labour markets in the majority of developed countries. The different earnings are determined mainly by the different sectors, professions and positions that men and women choose. The behavioural approach to interpretation of the labour market agents' decisions can help to explain the choice of different working career paths. The approach focuses on subjective individual preferences and their intrinsic rewards and motivations that cannot be explained by objective rational rules. The paper confirms the different relation of men and women to risk and competition and different preferences to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and rewards. The author's existing research on Czech data is used. Women indeed preferred a lower risk, although the difference was not large (-0.7 points on a scale of 0-10), while gender does not matter for people with university education. The level of accepted risk was increased by education, career preferences, pride and partnership. On the contrary, having children and their number did not affect the level of accepted risk. As far as extrinsic and intrinsic rewards and motivations were concerned, the preference for intrinsic rewards was higher among women (44%) than men (31%). Women preferred intrinsic rewards compared to higher wages more likely than men. Women with university education preferred intrinsic rewards with the same probability as men with the same degree of education. The preference of non-monetary rewards and motivation increased with higher education.

This study explores whether companies´ experience benefits when the firm's CEO and owner are both women. It employs data from the 2009-2014 World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) to measure firms' performance through growth in sales and productivity. Potential endogeneity was corrected by using the UN Gender Development Index and the average fertility rate as they comply with the exclusion restrictions. The paper uses the Control Function method with a Probit first stage estimation and an OLS main equation. The findings suggest that a female owner strengthens the female CEO's business skills and leads to better firm performance than when the CEO is a woman and the owner is a man.

Using data from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, the study examines the causes of variation in the unexplained gender pay gap among 25 European countries and considers the effect of the legal environment on these. We employ the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to estimate the unexplained part of the gender pay gap. To assess the impact of the rule of law on unexplained gender wage differences, we apply a linear regression model, where the estimated unexplained gender pay gap is used as a dependent variable and selected rule of law indicators (specifically the Worldwide Governance Indicators Rule of Law and the Legal System & Property Rights Index) as explanatory variables. Controlling for other institutions affecting gender wage differences (specifically labour market regulation, work-family reconciliation policy and male wage dispersion), we suggest that differences in the quality of legislation and law enforcement across European countries may partly account for the variation in the unexplained gender pay gap. A very progressive improvement in rule of law indices (from the worst to the best among the 25 European countries examined) leads to a decrease in the unexplained gender pay gap by 4.5-5 percentage points.

The paper is devoted to gender wage differences; it especially focuses on the impact of the gender characteristics of the manager on gender wage disparity. Under the social identity theory, women in managerial positions, that can affect the wage of their subordinates, are likely to evaluate female employees better than male employees. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the gender characteristics of middle managers on the wages of directly subordinated rank-and-file employees using a variation within the firm. We have used two methods to consider the effect of the manager gender characteristics on subordinates: the estimation of the wage function and the average treatment effect on the treated, both supplemented by a matching procedure. We concluded that women in middle management in comparison to their male counterparts have a lower tendency to apply wage discrimination against women. The presence of a female head of department led to a decrease in the gender pay gap by almost 7 percentage points.

This paper aims to quantify the basic structure of gender wage gaps in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, using the EU-SILC 2008 dataset. The structure of the gender wage gap is analyzed based on the Heckman selection model and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The findings are to a great extent similar for the Czech and Slovak Republics. The observed gender wage gap is relatively high in these two countries, compared to Hungary and Poland. A relatively small but positive part of the observed gender wage gap can be explained by gender differences in characteristics in the Czech and Slovak Republics, with a high contribution of job characteristics. An opposite result proved in Hungary and Poland, where working women have on average even better characteristics than working men, mainly in terms of individual characteristics.

The paper analyses the causes of the current situation of women on the labour market in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as women's chances for the future. It discusses the questions: Are women more at risk of unemployment than men in the future, or less? Will the twenty first century favour the development of women's career opportunities? The conclusion is that we are facing the end of industrial era and are moving towards the era of information and knowledge. Women are more prepared for these changes, as they are better educated, they are motivated to take up new challenges, and they posses the skills needed in new economy like the ability to communicate and cooperate, empathy and intuition.