Gender differences in French undergraduates’ academic plans and wage expectations

Gender differences in wage expectations may affect investment in human capital and increase inequalities in the labour market. Our research based on a survey of first-year students at a French university aims to focus on expectations at the beginning of the career. Our results show that anticipated earnings differ significantly between men and women. One year after graduation, we find a gender gap in pay of 16%. A wage decomposition method indicates that most of this effect is due to anticipation of discrimination. Ten years after graduation, anticipated discrimination is still almost as dominant in explaining the gender gap in pay. Finally, using a survey of recent college graduates, we show that growth in the anticipated gender gap differs greatly from growth in the observed gender gap. Our findings highlight the importance of policies promoting higher educational aspirations for young women. Career guidance counselling for students may play a decisive role in contributing to give women more ambitious aspirations, which may in turn serve to reduce inequalities in the labour market.     

Wage differentials between college graduates with and without learning disabilities

Wage differential studies examining legally protected groups typically focus on gender or racial differences. Legislation also fully protects individuals with learning disabilities (LD). This article is the first to decompose wage differentials between adults with and without LD. An original data set of college graduates with documented LD was constructed, and these individuals were compared to a control group from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Our results show that much of the observed lower wages for individuals with LD is due to differences in productivity characteristics. However, there is an unexplained portion of the wage gap that could possibly be considered wage discrimination against individuals with LD. This possibility seems smaller due to the fact that the subsample of the employers who knew of the employee's learning disabilities did not appear to pay significantly lower wages to these individuals. Alternative hypotheses are discussed, as are sample-specific issues.     

Women as part-time faculty members

Part-time positions in academe have long been considered women's work because of the opportunities they afford for child care and household responsibilities, as well as the lower status and pay which they generally carry. Recent data indicate that men are just as likely as women to be part-timers, and that the large majority of women do not fit the stereotypical view of women part-timers. This paper uses data from a nation-wide survey of part-timers, conducted by the American Association of University Professors in 1977, to compare job-related characteristics of males and females and their motivations for working part-time. The data suggest that part-time academic employment may, in fact, be a female issue since some differences between the sexes are found to exist. In several instances women appear to be worse off than their male counterparts. The article concludes with policy recommendations to improve this situation.     

Gender wage gaps by college major in Taiwan: Empirical evidence from the 1997–2003 Manpower Utilization Survey

In this article, we examine the effect of incorporating the fields of study on the explained and unexplained components of the standard Oaxaca decomposition for the gender wage gaps in Taiwan using 1997–2003 Manpower Utilization Survey data. Using several existing and lately developed measures, we inspect the gender wage gap by college major to investigate whether gender wage discrimination exists in a specific field of study in Taiwan. We find that controlling for the major dummies does enhance the proportion of the characteristic effects in the Oaxaca-type decomposition. This finding is similar to those results found in western countries. However, using decomposition methods designed to assess within sector wage gaps, we find gender wage differences are statistically negligible in all majors except medicine. Our results can provide useful information on the economic returns to different disciplines to current and future college students, institutions, and government policy-makers.     

Mathematical self-concept: How college reinforces the gender gap

Research in the past decade suggests that persistent gender gaps in math achievement may be rooted in gender differences in math self-concept. Yet, limited research exists on how students' math self-concept develops, and whether this differs between men and women. Using a sample of 8,997 women and 6,053 men, this study examines the factors associated with the development of women's and men's mathematical self-concept during college. Findings reveal a number of student background characteristics and college environments and experiences that contribute to an overall decline in math self-concept during college, and show how college reinforces the gender gap in math confidence. Additionally, in an attempt to answer the perennial question of whether it is “better to be a big frog in a small pond or a small frog in a big pond,” the study pays special attention to the relationship between institutional selectivity and math self-concept. Although institutional selectivity is correlated with declines in math self-concept, results show that specific aspects of selective environments, rather than selectivity itself, are more important predictors of math self-concept. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in Minneapolis.     

Women Mentoring in Academe: addressing the gender gap in higher education

Although the number of women in management and administrative positions in all sectors of the economy is increasing over time, the majority of senior positions are still held by men. The lack of women role models in high management and administrative positions has been well documented, as has the lack of women faculty in many academic departments, and barriers to women's leadership due to male‐orientated organizational expectations. Research has shown that mentoring can significantly enhance income and promotion possibilities for individuals experiencing these relationships. In academe, mentoring awareness can reduce barriers to women's career advancement, tenure and pay. The objectives of this study were to explore mentoring functions senior women provided to their juniors and identify mentoring limitations women faced in academe. Senior women favored career mentoring and provided less psychosocial support. Subsequently, the classical mentoring experience is not realized. Research findings suggested recommendations for academic institutions interested in utilizing this strategy to advance women.     

Addressing Gender Equity in Nonfaculty Salaries

While over one hundred studies have been conducted at both the institutional and national levels to determine if male and female faculty receive different levels of pay, there are very few published studies that have addressed similar gender equity concerns for other groups of academic employees. This research illustrates ways in which gender equity studies can be performed on noninstructional employees such as operating staff (OS) and professional/administrative staff (PAS) in higher education. The article addresses the selection of variables for inclusion in the multiple regression model, the alternative approaches for measuring the unexplained wage gap, and the methods that could be utilized for adjusting women's salaries when inequities are found to exist. To illustrate these concepts, data on the operating and professional/administrative staff at one institution are analyzed. It is found that experience and market differences account for about eighty percent of the pay difference between male and female professional/administrative staff and half of the pay difference for operating staff, and that the cost of adjusting women's salaries varies significantly across methods.     

Explaining the gender gaps in mathematics achievement and attitudes: The role of societal gender equality

The gender stratification hypothesis maintains that higher levels of societal gender equity predict smaller gender gaps in mathematics achievement and attitudes. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) across 56 countries, this study aims to provide a thorough empirical test of the gender stratification hypothesis. We employ a novel two-stage empirical strategy to investigate the link between societal gender equities and gender differences in mathematics achievement and attitudes. In the first stage, we use a semiparametric Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) method to decompose the gender gaps in each country into a part that is explained by gender differences in observable characteristics and a part that remains unexplained. In the second stage, we examine the relationships between the unexplained parts of the gender gaps and country-specific gender equity measures. The results highlight the importance of gender equity in the labor market in explaining cross-country variation in the gender math gap. We find that lower gender wage gap is significantly associated with a smaller unexplained part of the gender math gap favoring boys. In terms of the gender gaps in math attitudes, the results yield mixed support for the gender stratification hypothesis.     

Bye bye Ms. American Sci: Women and the leaky STEM pipeline

More than two-thirds of STEM jobs are held by men. In this paper, I provide a detailed analysis of the STEM pipeline from high school to mid-career in the United States, decomposing the gender gap in STEM into six stages. Women are lost from STEM before college, during college, and after college. Men are more likely to be STEM-ready before college, scoring higher on science tests and having taken more advanced math and science courses. This accounts for 35% of the overall gender gap in STEM careers. During college, men are far more likely than women to start in a STEM major, accounting for 26% of the gap. After college, male STEM graduates are more likely to enter STEM jobs, accounting for 41%. Men’s higher persistence in STEM majors is a smaller factor, while women attend college at higher rates than men, which works to reduce the final gender gap in STEM. The results show that there is no single stage to focus on in understanding the gender gap in STEM.     

Salary Structure Effects and the Gender Pay Gap in Academia

This paper presents estimates of the gender salary gap and discrimination based on the most recent national faculty survey data. New estimates for 1999 indicate that male faculty members still earn 20.7% more than comparable female colleagues. Depending upon which decomposition technique is employed, the portion of this gap attributable to discrimination is 17% or, 19–23%. Both estimates of the unexplained salary gap are lower than previous estimates. Furthermore, application of the Juhn technique shows that differences in salary structure, especially between research and liberal arts institutions, constitutes an important determinant of the relative gender pay gap between institutional types.     

Choice of majors: are women really different from men?

The gender wage gap persists in the workplace in part because women major in fields that lead them into lower-paid occupations than fields associated with majors men choose. An open question is why women are more likely than men to switch towards majors that lead to lower-paying careers. Drawing on research suggesting that women are affected more by negative feedback than men, we use unique administrative data from a large private university on the East Coast from 2008 to 2016 to test whether women are more likely than men to switch majors in response to low grades in major-related classes. We also test whether the prevalence of men in a major or a major’s reputation for being stereotypically male-oriented induces women to switch out of that major more readily than men. We control for other factors that may affect a student’s final major, including high school performance, gender composition of faculty and peers, and economic returns of majors. The results show that overall women and men are equally likely to change their majors in response to poor grades in major-related courses. We also find no evidence that women in male-dominated majors are more likely than men to switch out, but we find that men with very low grades in female-dominated majors are more likely to switch out of these majors than women. In addition, we find that women are more likely to switch out of majors that are both male-dominated and STEM in response to poor performance compared to men. Thus, our results suggest that only when women students experience multiple signals suggesting their lack of fit in a field (i.e., low grades combined with gender peer composition, and external stereotyping signals) they tend to switch out of the major more often than male students. We find that men exhibit this tendency in response to even fewer overlapping signals about misfit than women.     

Labor force experience and earnings: Women with children

Married women with children are observed to earn less than men, and less also than women without children. Differences in the hourly wage rates of individuals of the same age and with the same educational attainment may reflect, in part, differences in labor force experience. While interruption in the work experience of women is recognized as an important cause of lower current wage rates, less attention has been directed to the impact of child-related reductions in hours worked when women are in the labor force. This paper examines the impact of hours worked in all past periods on the current wage rate. Our model, in which the ‘intensity’ of an individual's work experience in any period can vary from 0 (no work) to 100% (full-time work), is contrasted with the standard human capital earnings function, in which intensity is assumed to be 100% in every period subsequent to the completion of school. Using a new data set, both models are estimated for a sample of working mothers. Contrasting the wages of the women in this sample with the wages of their husbands, we find that differences in the intensity of prior work experience account for approximately half of the observed sex-related wage gap.     

Substitution of women for men faculty in higher education: Do relative salaries matter?

The paper provides quantitative estimates of the degree of substitutability between men and women faculty in higher education and examines the extent to which price (salary) differentials have played a role in altering the sex distribution in academe. Our results suggest uniformly low own-price elasticities with cross elasticities which differ by academic rank and sex. Further analysis is made of whether institutions of higher education have increased the proportion of females at the upper ranks due to salary factors. Our conclusion is that nonsalary factors appear to have been responsible for the changing sex distribution in academe.     

Educational returns beyond the mean: Differences along wage distributions of men and women in India's formal labor market

Unlike previous studies on educational returns in developing countries, this paper examines the distributional impacts of education on wages using a recently developed econometric approach – unconditional quantile regressions. The results yield unconditional impacts of education at different points of the wage distribution and, therefore, are more informative from a policy perspective than both traditional regression and quantile regression methods commonly used for estimating educational returns. We use a nationally representative dataset on labor markets in India, collected in 2005–2006. The results reveal significant heterogeneity in education's effects along the wage distribution and striking differences in these patterns by gender: the effect of primary education is found to be significantly higher for women than men in the middle of the wage distribution; while the effect of post primary education exhibits a distinct pattern whereby women get significantly higher rewards than men above the median and significantly lower rewards than men below the median. These findings have direct implications for the targeting of education policies that seek to reduce gender wage inequality.     

POSTCOLLEGE EARNINGS OF FORMER STUDENTS OF CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES: Methods, Analysis, and Implications

In the wake of new federal and state mandates,community colleges are faced with demands to provideaccountability reports on student outcomes. With the useof the Employment Development Department Unemployment Insurance (EDD-UI) wage record data, along withthe California Community Colleges Chancellor's OfficeManagement Information System administrative database,this study sought to investigate the extent to which completing an associate degree andvocational certificate impacts the postcollege earningsof students. Based on information from 700,564 studentsfrom California community colleges during the 1992-93 academic year, the findings suggest thatstudents' gains from first year out of college to thirdyear out will differ by age group. Among economicallydisadvantaged students, a strong positive relationship exists between educational attainment andpostcollege gains. An important finding among vocationalstudents is that as women complete more education, theearnings gap closes between men and women. Finally, this study raises several policy implicationsand presents suggestions for future research.     

才子佳人小说之“对称性”研究

才子佳人小说是明末清初出现的一种文学现象,是一种不容忽视的客观存在。着重论述才子佳人小说的"对称性":从"情才","男女平衡倾向","诗媒","一夫一妻(二妻)"等几个方面进行深入的分析,从而得出才子佳人小说中的男女主人公在尽力地追求幸福的结论。但理想与现实之间有太大的差距,使得男女双方在各自的爱情争夺战中都要付出一定的代价。     

基于性别差异的我国高校毕业生就业特征研究

本研究基于北京大学2009年度全国高校毕业生就业抽样调查数据,针对社会科学研究中的高度复杂性、非线性和不确定性特征,运用复杂性科学研究中的神经网络拟合仿真方法,较好地分离出性别差异对我国高校毕业生就业工作特征和流动特征的影响。研究表明:性别因素将会导致10.89%的薪金差距;男性获得就业地户口的机率比女性高出9.27%;从整体上看,男女大学生就业单位性质的差异并不明显。相对上述就业工作特征,毕业生流动特征的性别差异较为显著:男性毕业生比女性具有更强的流动性,除了就业流动以外,上学流动、毕业流动的性别差异度分别是19.5%和23.77%,全流动差异更是达到了40.57%;而男女毕业生就业流动概率的差异度仅有2.77个百分点,其主要是女性的流动惰性所造成的。     

Kids,College, and Capital: Parental Financial Support and College Choice

Parents vary in both their willingness and ability to pay for their children’s college expenses, yet there is little research on how adolescents’ expectations of future financial support from parents affect their college enrollment decisions. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study, I fill this gap in the literature by examining the predictors of parents’ plans to pay for college and estimating the effect of having a parent that plans to pay for college on an adolescent’s probability of college attendance. The results suggest that after parents’ ability to pay is taken into account, social class remains a strong predictor of whether parents plan to pay for their children’s college education. Additionally, parent’s plans to pay for college have a measurable impact on children’s college enrollment as long as the child is aware of or agrees with the parent’s plans. Therefore, it is likely that socioeconomic differences in parents’ pledges of financial support to adolescents contribute to postsecondary stratification. The results from this study suggest that policymakers and researchers who are concerned about educational inequality should pay greater attention to the role of parental financial support in structuring children’s ability to access college.     

Does the expansion of higher education reduce gender gaps in the labor market? Evidence from a natural experiment

In 2005 Chilean congress approved a bill that established a new funding tool for higher education funding through a "private system" of student loans (named CAE). The system aimed to support higher education inclusion among students with academic merits overcoming the lack of resources for ensuring access. Politicians have referred to this reform in higher education funding as a critical factor for expanding higher education enrollment. By its immediate results, it is a great strategy to cope with inequality and social mobility issues. However, there is little empirical evidence about labor market variables' overall effects, such as gender discrimination. This work attempts to estimate the new instrument's impact on the three standard measures of gender labor discrimination: labor participation, the gender wage gap, and the glass ceiling. The empirical strategy uses a difference-in-difference approach to provide estimates. The results indicate that the CAE policy changed women's labor market participation and contributed to close the gender pay gap in the labor market. However, the glass ceiling increased in the entire labor market, but not in the white-collar job market in specific.