Attitudes to gender and personality in the Australian gender wage gap

Mustafa Kamal and Paul Blacklow

No 2021-07, Working Papers from University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates the effects of gender role attitudes and personality traits on the gender wage gap in Australia. Applying standard decomposition techniques and controlling for a wide range of variables, the paper finds that the overall gender wage gap in our estimates on average stood at 17.2% in 2019. Furthermore, the major portion of this wage gap remains unexplained, which accounts for at least 72.7% of the total gender wage gap. The results establish gender role attitudes as a key predictor of this pay gap both in the explained and unexplained part of the wage decomposition. It also shows that the impact of personality traits depends on whether the big five traits or the sub-traits are used in the analysis. Even some of the sub-traits belonging to the same category can influence the gender pay gap in opposite directions. Overall, the estimates establish the importance of psychological variables as more important than traditional human capital and other work-related characteristics in explaining the remaining gender wage gap in Australia.

Keywords: gender wage gap; wage decompositions; gender role attitudes; personality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published by the University of Tasmania. Discussion paper 2021-07

Downloads: (external link)
https://eprints.utas.edu.au/38717/1/2021-07_Kamal_Blacklow(1).pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 401 Unauthorized

Related works:
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:tas:wpaper:38717

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oscar Pavlov ().