Mind the task: evidence on persistent gender gaps at the workplace

The Institute of Economics will hold a webinar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Tuesday, February 16, 2021: Marta Fana from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission will present the paper "Mind the task: evidence on persistent gender gaps at the workplace".

Abstract:

The article addresses gender differences in tasks performed at the workplace over a period of 25 years, from 1991 and 2016 in France. The authors exploit data from the Enquête Complémentaire Emploi: Conditions de travail, the oldest survey at the worker level among European countries on a wide range of work attributes and working conditions measures. In the study, the authors focus both on the content of work form a material perspective,looking concretely at what job tasks are performed by men and women, and on work organisational practices, to capture gender disparities in authority and power relations at the workplace. The results reveal that women tend to perform different task compared to their male colleagues within the same job also after controlling for supply-side factors, like education, age and seniority. In particular, women tend to perform less physical tasks but also intellectual ones, while no significant differences emerge for social tasks capturing interaction with other people. More importantly, the authors' models show that gender matters in terms of work organisation and distribution of power, unbalanced in favor of men. Finally, the study shows that these gender effects often exacerbate within male dominated jobs, although they do not necessarily disappear as the share of female workers increase at the job level. The authors conclude that power and authority are structurally a prerogative of men, regardless of individual and job characteristics, even within female dominated jobs

All interested participants are welcome to join online at the following link. External participants need to contact the organisers via email to grant access to the seminar.