Family, Firms and the Gender Wage Gap in France

Elise Coudin, Sophie Maillard () and Maxime To
Additional contact information
Sophie Maillard: INSEE

No 2018-09, Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics

Abstract: This paper explores how two main channels explaining the gender wage gap, namely the heterogeneity of firm pay policies and sex-specific wage consequences of parenthood, interact. We explore the firm heterogeneity channel by applying the model proposed by Card, Cardoso, and Kline 2016. After controlling for individual and firm heterogeneity, we show that the sorting of women into lower-paying firms accounts for 11 % of the average gender wage gap in the French private sector, whereas within-firm gender inequality does not contribute to the gap. Performing these decompositions all along workers’ life cycle, we find evidence that this sorting mechanism activates shortly after birth. These gender-specific and dynamic firm choices generate wage losses all along mothers’ careers, in addition to direct child wage penalties. After birth, mothers tend to favor firms with more flexible work hours and home proximity, which may be detrimental to their labor market opportunities, as, within these contexts, firms may gain relative monopsonic power.

Keywords: gender wage gap; gender inequalities; linked employer-employee; data; two-way fixed effect models; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2018-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-gen and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://crest.science/RePEc/wpstorage/2018-09.pdf CREST working paper version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Family, firms and the gender wage gap in France (2018)
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:crs:wpaper:2018-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Secretariat General () and Murielle Jules Maintainer-Email : murielle.jules@ensae.Fr.