EFFECT OF LEGISLATION ON INEQUALITY/DISCRIMINATION

Effect of Legislation on Inequality/Discrimination

Effect of legislation on inequality/discrimination

Introduction

US-based research consistently shows that female-dominated occupations tend to yield lower wages than male-dominated occupations, net of diverse individual- and occupation-level controls. However, few studies have explicitly compared the effect of occupational gender composition to the within-occupation gender gap in terms of their relative contribution to overall gender wage inequality. We address this by testing a two-level hierarchical linear model, using highly reliable wage and occupational data from the Dutch labor market. Our results suggest that although female-dominated occupations pay less than male-dominated occupations, much of this gap is explained by a set of individual-, and occupation-level controls. However, we find compelling evidence of men's net wage advantage across all occupations, regardless of occupational gender composition. Finally, we find that this male wage advantage decreases as percentage female in an occupation increases.

Numerous studies link the demographic composition of jobs, occupations, and establishments to diverse employment-related outcomes including hiring decisions (Konrad and Pfeffer, 1991), men's job satisfaction ( Wharton and Baron, 1987), the likelihood that women experience the negative effects of gender stereotyping ( Kanter, 1977; Konrad et al., 1992), women's access to managerial positions ( Cohen et al., 1998; Jaffee, 1989; Kraus and Yonay, 2000; Maume, 1999), and the distribution of employment benefits across work organizations ( Deitch and Huffman, 2001). Additionally, several generations of researchers (e.g., England, 1992; England et al., 1996; Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993) have documented the role of gender segregation in maintaining the gender wage gap by demonstrating that female-dominated jobs and occupations offer lower pay than male-dominated jobs and occupations, even when they entail “comparable” work roles. This type of wage inequality—inequality found between jobs and occupations of varying gender composition—has been the primary focus of comparable worth proponents in the United States, who argue that the low relative pay in female-dominated jobs reflects gender-based ascription in job worth (see Baron and Newman, 1990; England, 1992; Nelson and Bridges, 1999). Studies have also shown that this source of wage inequality accounts for more of the overall wage gap than gender-based pay differences occurring within jobs and occupations (Groshen, 1991; Petersen and Morgan, 1995).

In this paper, we directly address both sources of wage inequality, by using recently released Dutch labor market data that include highly reliable wage measures and an unusually detailed occupational classification. (Williams,1995)

Specifically, we make several distinctive and important contributions to the existing literature on gender-based wage inequality. First, very few studies have focused on the relative importance of within-job wage inequality vis-à-vis the contextual effect of occupational gender composition, and there have been no such studies in the Netherlands. On the one hand, the Dutch labor market has a relatively large proportion of part-time working women compared to other industrialized countries, and the increase in labor force participation of Dutch women began relatively late (see Sociaal Cultureel Planbureau, 2000). On the other hand, the Netherlands is comparable to other nations (both in Europe and elsewhere) with respect to its degree of occupational gender ...