Gender gaps in skills and labor market outcomes: evidence from the PIAAC
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Gender gaps in skills and labor market outcomes: evidence from the PIAAC 1
Yolanda F. Rebollo-Sanz
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Sara De la Rica
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Received: 27 September 2019 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Our paper makes the first attempt to address the empirical relationRicship between cognitive skills and gender gaps in labor market performance. We do so in a crosscountry setting. To that end we use the PIAAC dataset, which contains information on OECD and non-OECD economies. Firstly, we document the existence of gender gaps in cognitive skills for numeracy, which are found to be around 2.5–4.6% and increase with age. These gaps remain even when comparing men and women within the same level and field of study. Next, we document sizable gender gaps in labor market outcomes, such as Labor Force Participation and hourly wages—around 18%, increase with age and rise remarkably for parents. Math skills are positively and strongly associated with these two labor market outcomes and its contribution to explain gender gaps, although significant, is limited—between 10 15% at most—in particular for parents. JEL classification J16 J24 J31 ●
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Keywords Gender wage gap Gender gap in labor force Cognitive skills PIAAC ●
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1 Introduction Over the last twenty years, there has been a narrowing of gender gaps in different labor market outcomes such as employment rates, hours worked, and wage rates, among others, in all advanced economies, mainly driven by a large expansion in women’s education. However, these gender gaps still continue even after proxies for human capital endowments of workers—such as education, age or experience—are
* Yolanda F. Rebollo-Sanz [email protected] 1
Departamento de Economía, Métodos Cuantitativos e Historia Económica, Area de Análisis Económico, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Carretera de Utrera km.1, 41013 Seville, Spain
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Departamento de Economía, Universidad del País Vasco, ISEAK, Leioa, Spain
Y. F. Rebollo-Sanz, S. De la Rica
taken into account (Blau et al. 2008; England et al. 2012; Blau and Kahn 2017). This is referred to as the “unexplained” or “adjusted” gender gap and, as some empirical papers show (see Blau and Kahn 2017; Boll et al. 2016), unexplained factors still accounted for a substantial share of the observed wage gender gap.1 In this paper we propose to test whether the use of more direct measures of human capital endowment help understanding this unexplained component of the gender gap in labor market outcomes. To this end, we take advantage of the appearance of new datasets that offer direct measures of cognitive competences. In particular, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC) offers individual measures of cognitive skills for the adult population across a significant number of countries. Our paper deals precisely with the association between the adjusted gender gaps in labor market outcomes and gender gaps in cognitive skills. To measure such association, we believe th
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