Gender Differences in Job Assignment and Promotion in a Complexity Ladder of Jobs

Tuomas Pekkarinen and Juhana Vartiainen
Additional contact information
Juhana Vartiainen: Trade Union Institute for Economic Research, Postal: FIEF, Wallingatan 38, SE-111 24 Stockholm, Sweden

No 184, Working Paper Series from Trade Union Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper studies gender differences in the allocation of workers across tasks of different complexity using panel data from a representative sample of Finnish metalworkers during 1990- 2000. Finnish metal industry data provide a continuous measure of the complexity of the worker’s tasks that can be used to construct a complexity ladder of jobs. We study whether women have to pass a higher productivity threshold to be promoted to more complex tasks. Gender differences in promotion rates, duration to promotion, and productivity among promoted and not promoted workers are estimated. It is found that women move up the ladder less than men, women have to wait longer to get promoted, and that women are on average more productive than men in the groups of both promoted and not-promoted workers. These productivity differentials are not observed within tasks at the initial task assignment. We interpret this as evidence on higher female promotion thresholds.

Keywords: Careers; Job ladders; Job complexity; Gender and wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2002-12-17
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/fiefwp/papers/WP184.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Differences in Job Assignment and Promotion on a Complexity Ladder of Jobs (2004)
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:hhs:fiefwp:0184

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Trade Union Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sune Karlsson ().