Voting Patterns and the Gender Wage Gap

Wifag Adnan and Sami Miaari ()

No 11261, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Striving for gender equality presents major challenges but the benefits are vast, ranging from reduced conflict, both within and between communities, to higher economic growth. Unfortunately, Israel's gender wage gap remains one of the highest among developed countries, despite a growing reverse gender gap in educational attainment. Investigating the gender wage gap for the Jewish majority and for the Arab minority, we find evidence of gender segregation by industry and occupations in addition to a glass ceiling effect for Jewish and Arab women. Using data from the Israeli Household Income Survey and electoral data from the Israeli parliamentary elections (2009), this paper provides novel evidence of the role of voter preferences in explaining the persistence of gender pay gaps. Importantly, we find strong evidence of an association between a higher share of votes allocated to nationalist parties, in a given locality, and a larger, (adjusted), gender wage gap for both Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis.

Keywords: glass door; glass ceiling; voting behavior; gender wage gap; social attitudes; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C24 J21 J31 J45 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cdm, nep-gen, nep-lab and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Forthcoming - forthcoming in: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

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Journal Article: Voting patterns and the gender wage gap (2018)
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