Do Employers' Responses to Crises Impact Men and Women Differently? Firm‐level Evidence from Indonesia

Abstract

Do employers' responses to crises impact men and women differently? Using manufacturing census data from Indonesia this paper assesses gender differences in the impact of the East Asian crisis and to what extent these were due to differential treatment of men and women within firms and gender sorting across firms that varied in their exposure to the crisis. On average, women experienced higher job losses than their male colleagues within the same firm. However, the aggregate adverse effect of such differential treatment was more than offset by women being disproportionately employed in firms hit relatively less hard by the crisis. The null hypothesis that there were no gender differences in wage adjustment is not rejected.

Do Crises Hit Female-Managed and Male-Managed Firms Differently? Evidence from the 2008 Financial Crisis

“…Lim (2000) looked at the e ects of the East Asian crisis in the Philippines and found that while women were displaced more in the manufacturing sector, they overall su ered less from the crisis as sectors with high female employment such as social and personal services, trade, and wholesale were hit less hard. Similar results are found by Hallward-Driemeier et al (2017) that examined how variations in rms' responses during the East Asian crisis in Indonesia a ected men's and women's relative employment vulnerability. ey found that women experienced higher job losses than their male colleagues within the same rm.…”