Seminar «Is Women's Work Devalued? Evidence from Unique Personnel Data of a Russian Firm during Transition (1990-2006)»
A joint research seminar of the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies and the Centre for Labour Market Studies was held at HSE on December 10, 2019.
Speaker: Hartmut Lehmann (CLMS HSE, IZA, University of Bologna).
Theme: Is Women's Work Devalued? Evidence from Unique Personnel Data of a Russian Firm during Transition (1990-2006).
Were gender inequalities in the labor markets in transition countries narrowing over time? It may seem that answers to such question could be provided simply by looking at the average wages among men and women. However, if we followed such procedure, the conclusions could be quite different from results obtained if one utilizes individual data to compare only those that are "comparable", or in other words, if the labor market situation of individual women is compared to men who have the same characteristics.
In this study, we aim to compare men and women who are similar not only when it comes to their demographic characteristics, but also when it comes to the company for which they work, and to very narrowly defined positions in that company. To achieve that goal, we perform a case study analysis of personnel data that provides additional insight in the developments of the gender wage gaps in the process of transition. The analyzed dataset covers the period of 1990-2006 and contains detailed information on all workers employed in the analyzed large industrial company in Russia. This unique dataset allows us to analyze the evolution of the gender wage gap in an internal labor market already for the early transition years, and to study the career history of its workers. We are able to track changes between main occupational types, e.g. between production workers and technicians, as well as between smaller occupational levels within the group of production workers.
We find that the raw gender wage gaps in the analyzed company operating in Russia were evolving according to an inverse U-shape pattern over time. The gender wage gaps were very small in the early 1990s, but significantly increased after the transition, reaching the highest level in 1998. The gender wage differences were then decreasing until the last available year of 2006.
We find that differences in demographic characteristics or education do not explain observed differences in wages, while accounting for job-related characteristics explains most of the raw gender wage gap. We also find that the raw gender wage gaps in the analyzed firm appear at the moment of getting employment, as women are hired in occupations that offer lower wages. Moreover, if we compare the same women and men over time, we mainly find increased gender wage differences, since in most years the wages in male-dominated occupations were increasing relatively more.
Joint work with Thomas Dohmen (University of Bonn and IZA) and Karolina Goraus-Tanska (University of Warsaw).(HSE International College of Economics and Finance).