Gender employment discrimination and product market competition: evidence for Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to test empirical implications of the classical Beckerian theory on discrimination against women in Brazil. Specifically, we examine how the relationship between women’s relative employment and firm performance varies with its market power. Using a panel of longitudinal microdata linking information at firm level from a matched employer-employee data (RAIS) and a firm level survey with detailed information on firm performance (PIA-Empresa) from 2002 to 2013, we propose a new measure for women’s relative employment. In general, our results indicate a positive and significant relationship between relative employment of women and profitability for firms with high market power. We also find that the way the relationship between relative employment of women and profit depends on market power is strongly affected by how women relative employment is measured. This relationship is much more stable when this variable is measured by the index we propose.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender discrimination
• women relative employment
• market power
• occupational composition

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J71
• J16

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to comments and suggestions from an anonymous referee and Marcel de Toledo Vieira, Miguel Foguel, Cecília Machado, Daniele Carusi, and Flávia Chein. We are grateful for the financial support of FAPEMIG, CAPES and CNPq Brazilian agencies, as well as the Brazilian Ministry of Economy (MTE) and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) for accessing data from the Annual Report of Social Information (RAIS), and the Annual Industrial Survey - Company (PIA-Company), respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Macpherson and Hirsch (1995) and Bayard et al. (2003) can be highlighted.

² We used a measure very similar to that employed by Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (2002), which is the ratio between value added and production.

³ Values outside the range of 1.0 to −1.5 for the ratio defined in the previous footnote.

⁴ See the first column of Table 4 in Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (2002) work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [#305797/2019-0,438574/2018-4]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais [#PPM-00703-17].