What Is the Price of Freedom? Estimating Women’s Willingness to Pay for Job Schedule Flexibility

Abstract

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Miss-Allocation: The Value of Workplace Gender Composition and Occupational Segregation

“…This provides direct quantitative evidence for the causes of tipping points posited by Schelling (1971), Brock andDurlauf (2001), andPan (2015) and further understanding of the tendency for women to choose more female jobs shown by Delfino (2021), Larson-Koester (2017), and Engel et al (2022. This also adds to the literature on the importance of non-pecuniary amenities in job choice (Sorkin, 2018;Mas and Pallais, 2017;Wiswall and Zafar, 2018;Bustelo et al, 2022) by showing that the composition of the workplace itself, in addition to amenities provided directly by the firm, may be an important driver of job choice. This has important implications for understanding the causes of inequality across demographic groups.…”

“…For women over 55, the likelihood of valuing a more female workplace increases with age, but for younger 4 My design is not incentivized and relies on respondents answering questions in a way that reflects their true preferences. This style of survey experiment has been incentivized by offering customized job postings (Kessler et al, 2019;Bustelo et al, 2022) or information on survey results to respondents (Drake, Marshall et al, 2022). In my setting where workers are highly heterogeneous in employment status, occupation, and location, it was not clear that these incentives would be effective, but I have piloted randomly offering respondents job suggestions that depend on their responses.…”

Gender Disparities in Valuing Remote and Hybrid Work in Latin America

“…This approach provides insights into the valuation of workplace flexibility among different groups, informing employers about the value workers place on non-pecuniary job attributes. We also compare declared vs. revealed preferences for flexibility using a DCE, an aspect barely explored in literature Bustelo et al (2023). Aligning our findings with Bloom et al (2022), who highlighted graduate students' high valuation of hybrid jobs, offers insights into preference consistency or divergence across different contexts.…”

“…therefore, experience a greater preference for jobs with more flexibility. Evidence from Bustelo et al (2023) suggests that women are willing to sacrifice part of their wages to have a more flexible job in terms of schedule. This study, however, focuses on another type of flexibility: workplace flexibility.…”

“…However, little research has examined gender differences in this willingness in Latin America. A recent study in Colombia found that women highly value flexible work options and are willing to pay for a full-time flexible schedule, but have less interest in part-time contracts Bustelo et al (2023). Our paper aims to investigate gender differences in the willingness to pay for remote work flexibility in five Latin American countries (Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile) offering new insights into labor preferences in contexts with large informal sectors and low female labor participation.…”