Cognitive Skills among Adults: An Impeding Factor for Gender Convergence?

Michele Battisti, Alexandra Fedorets and Lavinia Kinne

No 10428, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: While gender differences in labor force participation and wages have been studied extensively, gender gaps in cognitive skills among adults are not yet well understood. Using the PIAAC dataset, this paper presents novel findings on cognitive skill distributions by gender across 34 countries. Despite increasing educational equality, inequalities in numeracy skills favoring men compared to women are pervasive. These skill differences account for a sizable part of the gender wage gap. Furthermore, there are larger disadvantages for women at the top of the wage distribution, which are complemented by lower returns to skills compared to men. We also find that these numeracy-wage patterns are especially pronounced for parents and for those with the highest degree in a non-STEM field of study.

Keywords: gender wage gap; skills; numeracy; PIAAC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-mfd and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10428.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Cognitive Skills among Adults: An Impeding Factor for Gender Convergence? (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10428

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().