The gender wage gap and the moderating effect of education in public and private sector employment

Abstract

In many countries, the rules and statutes governing public employment promote both transparency and accountability in employee hiring, promotion, and wage setting. These aspects of public employment might mitigate the pay inequalities women face in the public workplace relative to the private sector. At the same time, these formal aspects of public sector employment and payment systems might also limit the ability of women in the public sector to leverage human capital increases as a means of reducing pay inequalities. Utilizing 25 years of employee‐level data from Denmark, we find that women professionals in the Danish public sector face a smaller wage penalty than their private sector counterparts. However, our findings also suggest that public employment may place structural limits on their ability to leverage educational attainment to close the gap even further.

The effect of tourism on gender equality in the labour market: Helpmate or hindrance?

“…Including economic growth ensures that the model captures the impact of changes in aggregate demand on the labour market and the resultant changes in the differential between male and female labour outcomes (Wamboye & Seguino, 2015). Turning to government size, the public sector has been lauded as a model employer, as discrimination against women tends to be smaller than that recorded in the private sector (Stritch & Villadsen, 2018). This may be related to strict pay schemes and the transparency of government wages, which make unequal pay for equal work less probable (Blau & Kahn, 2017).…”

Formalization and Administrative Burden as Obstacles to Employee Recruitment: Consequences for the Public Sector

“…High levels of formalization in job advertisements, especially rules that intentionally regulate individual behavior by decreasing discretion and behavioral variance (Borry et al, 2018), might signal to potential applicants that the organization is highly bureaucratic and rule-bound. In general, public organizations are influenced by structural circumstances such as standardized tenure and position-based payment structures that constitute formalized recruitment processes (Stritch & Villadsen, 2018). Details about labor agreements, pay brackets, and hiring legislation (Gravier & Roth, 2020; Zwicky & Kübler, 2019) illustrate the formalized nature of public sector recruitment advertisements (Harel & Tzafrir, 2001).…”

“…Recruitment processes in public organizations are often overly complicated due to lower levels of flexibility, procedural constraints in public personnel systems (Coursey & Rainey, 1990;Stritch & Villadsen, 2018), the political and bureaucratic environment (Gravier & Roth, 2020;Rainey, 1989), and excessive formalization (Chen & Rainey, 2014). Different aspects of personnel management are characterized by strictly defined, rule-based organizational structures (Borry et al, 2018), legislative complexity aimed at multiple goals (Gravier & Roth, 2020), and functions and processes that result in administrative burden for applicants.…”

The Economic Significance of Work Experience for Elderly Employment in Thailand

“…Empirical findings of the effect of work experience are generally consistent with human capital theory. An additional year of experience would increase the wage by 3.3% -3.5% in Thailand (Tangtipongkul, 2015), 2.86% in Greece (Agiomirgianakis, Lianos, & Tsounis, 2019), 3.15% for the native-born Latinos in the United States (Mattos, 2018), and 3.8% and 6.9% for civil servants and private sectors employees, respectively, in Denmark (Stritch & Villadsen, 2018). In terms of a gender perspective, an additional year of work experience in Turkey would increase the wage by 4.63% for males and 5.72% for females (Alcan & Özsoy, 2019), 6.13% for females in Pakistan (Qadir & Afzal, 2019), and 5.35% and 1.21% for males and females, respectively, in Brazil (Schwaab et al, 2019).…”