published as 'Skills, Personality Traits and Gender Wage Gaps: Evidence from Bangladesh' in: Oxford Economic Papers, 2019, 71(3), 687-708
We use a first-hand linked employer-employee dataset representing the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive skills and personality traits. Our results show that while cognitive skills are important in determining mean wages, personality traits have little explanatory power. However, quantile regressions indicate that personality traits do matter in certain parts of the conditional wage distribution, especially for wages of females.
Cognitive skills as measured by reading and numeracy also confer different benefits across the wage distribution to females and males respectively. Quantile decompositions indicate that these skills and traits reduce the unexplained gender gap, mainly in the upper parts of the wage distribution. Finally, results suggest that employers place greater consideration on observables such as academic background and prior work experience, and may also make assumptions about the existence of sex-specific skills of their workers, which could then widen the within-firm gender wage gap.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.