Segregation and Gender Gaps through the UK's Great Recession

Giovanni Razzu () and Carl Singleton

No em-dp2015-02, Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Reading

Abstract: Gender gaps in work respond to the business cycle. Although there are many potential explanations, this paper tests the simplest. Is this because of the extent of gender segregation in work? A counterfactual-type analysis is constructed which can account for the specific role of combined gender segregation across industry sectors and occupations that existed at the onset of the Great Recession in the UK. Gaps in employment, pay and hours worked are all studied. After accounting for the gender segregation of work at the broad sector and occupation group level, the results contradict the existing narrative that men's employment has been more harshly affected by the recession than women's employment: gender segregation accounts for over two and a half times the actual fall in the gender gap between 2007 and 2011. Results for pay and hours are more mixed. Gender segregation accounts for some of the fall in the pay gap, but does not explain the decline in the hours gap, nor the relatively greater rise in part-time work among men since 2007.

Keywords: gender; employment; hours; gender pay gap; gender segregation; business cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2015-11-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Feminist Economics, 2018, 24(4): 31-55, https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2018.1451907

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/economics/emdp2015117.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Segregation and Gender Gaps in the United Kingdom's Great Recession and Recovery (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:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2015-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Reading Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alexander Mihailov ().