The generational perspective of gender gap in wages and education in southern Europe

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating gender differentials in wages and education from an intergenerational perspective across four developed countries of southern Europe, considering the generational transmission of preferences and the gender equality systems and policies. Measures of gender inequality in wages and education permit exploring the different extent to which gender gaps depend on unobserved factors, such as discrimination. A first set of discrimination indexes is computed starting from the estimation of extended Mincerian log-earnings equations, whereas a second set is based on the estimation of ordered logistic regressions on a range of personal characteristics considered to be linked to education, controlling for family background. The main results show that family background affects the degree of gender inequality more than the gender equality policies do. Gender disparities in professional outcomes can be partly due to women’s preferences vs. lower-paid jobs because of the incomplete efficacy of national systems.

Keywords:

• Gender pay gap
• discrimination indexes
• high education
• latent variable

JEL Classifications:

• J16
• J7
• A23

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and necessary amendments on general and technical issues that led to many improvements in this work. Without their thoughtful support and rigorous comments, this work would not have been developed as it is now.

Notes

¹ Concerning personal characteristics, couple is a derived variable with value 1 if the employee is (or was) married, sharing or not the same house (also the legal spouse or registered partner or ‘de facto’ partner), and 0 if never married. Children is equal to 1 if the employee has dependent children and 0 otherwise. Urban (residence area) is 1 if the local area where the employee lives is densely populated and 0 otherwise. Individual education attainment refers to the highest level of formal education the employee has successfully completed (five categories) using pre-primary/primary (ISCED-97: 0,1) as the reference group. Experience refers to the number of years since starting the first regular job that a worker has spent at work. Concerning job characteristics, the type of contract is a dummy that takes the value of 1 if the employee has a permanent contract and 0 if temporary; working hours is categorised into the three groups of lower than 30 h (reference), between 30 and 40 h, and higher than 40 h. Occupational status is 1 if the employee occupies a managerial position and 0 otherwise. The profession variable is composed of eight dummies, with each capturing a specific professional status (ISCO classification) scaled according to skill levels and using elementary occupations as the reference group. Activity sector refers to the main branches of economic activity according to the NACE (Rev 1.1) classification; it is split into seven dummies with primary as the reference group. Firm size provides the three categories of small, medium and large based on the size (number of persons employed) of the enterprise in which the employee works.

² Cohort classifies employees according to the year of birth into five groups using the older group (1946–1956) as reference. The generational dimension is evaluated with respect to both the background of employee’s mother and father (i.e. education attainment, occupational status and profession). Siblings variable identifies the number of employee’s brothers or sisters (using until 1 as reference). Financial is a dummy with value 1 if the household had financial difficulties when the employee was a teenager and 0 otherwise.