Karen Mumford

Trade unions and family-friendly policies in Britain

This paper uses linked data on over 1,500 workplaces and 20,000 individuals from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey to analyze the relationship between labor unions and the availability of six employer-provided family-friendly policies. Although unions were negatively associated with the availability of work-at-home arrangements and flexible working hours options, they appear to have increased the availability of three other policies designed to help workers balance the demands of work and family: parental leave, special paid leave, and job-sharing options. They did so both by negotiating for additional benefits (monopoly and collective voice effects) and by providing workers with information about existing policies and assisting them in using those policies (facilitation effects).

The Hiring Function Reconsidered: On Closing the Circle

This paper is concerned with the matching of job searchers with vacant jobs: a key component of the dynamics of worker reallocation in the labour market. The job searchers may be unemployed, employed or not in the labour force and we estimate matching or hiring functions including all three groups. We show that previous studies, which ignore both employed job seekers and unemployed job seekers who are considered to be out of the labour force, produce biased estimates of the coefficients of interest. By considering the only unemployment outflows into jobs and ignorant interdependencies with other flows, these studies overlook an important aspect of job matching. Our estimates on Australian data support a more general approach and produce models that dominate those proposed previously. We also provide clear ranking preferences amongst job seekers in the hiring process: those already in jobs are more successful than the unemployed who are, in turn, more successful than those not in the labour force. Together these results demonstrate that the disaggregate worker flows and their interdependence are key features of the labour market and should be included in studies of the hiring process.

Absenteeism in the UK: A Comparison across Genders

We analyse an empirical model of absence from work based upon a variant of the traditional work-leisure model of labour supply. The model is tested with data from the 1993 UK Family Expenditure Survey and a comparison of absenteeism is made across genders. We find substantial differences in the probability of absenteeism across gender and various family situations. We also find that our conclusions concerning gender differences in absenteeism are sensitive to the definition of absenteeism used and that the differences in the determination of these measures may help to explain some of the existing disagreements in the literature. Copyright 2001 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester

The Position of Women in UK Academic Economics

This paper reports the results of the Royal Economic Society Womens Committee 1998 survey on the gender balance in UK academic economics. In 1998, female representation was 4% of professors, 11% of senior lecturers or readers, 17% of permanent lecturers, 28% of fixed term lecturers, and 33% of PhD/research students. The main growth in female representation since 1996 has been in fixed term lectureships and in PhD/research students (a 5 percentage point increase for each). We suggest reasons for the low representation of women in academic economics, and also argue that it is a cause for concern.

The Gender Earnings Gap in Britain: Including the Workplace

The earnings gap between male and female employees is substantial and lingering. Using linked data for Britain, in this paper we show that an important contribution to this gap is made by the workplace in which the employee works. Evidence for workplace and occupational segregation as partial explanations of the earnings gap is presented. Having allowed also for individual worker characteristics there remains a substantial within-workplace and within-occupation gender gap. The contribution of these factors, as well as the earnings gap itself, differ significantly across sectors of the labour market. The relative unimportance of occupational segregation and the large remaining gender gap suggest that stronger enforcement of equal pay legislation is likely to be the most appropriate policy response. Copyright

The public-private sector gender wage differential in Britain: evidence from matched employee-workplace data

This article shows that little of the gender earnings gap in the public and private sectors in Britain are explained by differences in employee characteristics. The differences in workplace characteristics, however, make a significant, sizeable contribution. It is shown that performance related pay and company pension schemes are associated with higher relative earnings in the private sector, whilst increased provision of family-friendly employment practices in the public sector is associated with higher relative earnings for women.

The Gender Pay Gap for Private-Sector Employees in Canada and Britain

The gender earnings differentials for private‐sector employees in Britain and Canada are similar, substantial and significant. Using linked employer–employee data, we show that women are more likely to be employed in low‐wage workplaces than men in both counties. After accounting for the workplace, women continue to earn less than comparable men. Although men and women face a more equal pay structure within their workplace than they do across workplaces, a substantial portion of the gender pay gap in both countries remains unexplained by the individual characteristics or workplace effects considered in this study.

The Gender Pay Gap in the Australian Private Sector: Is Selection Relevant Across the Earnings Distribution?

We use quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition methods to explore gender gaps across the earning distribution for a sample of full-time employees in the Australian private sector. Significant evidence of a self-selection effect for the women into full-time employment (or of components of self-selection related to observable or unobservable characteristics) is, interestingly, not found to be relevant in the Australian context. Substantial gender earnings gaps (and glass ceilings) are established, however, with these earnings gaps found to be predominantly related to the women receiving lower returns to their observable characteristics than the men.

Employee Training and Wage Dispersion: White and Blue Collar Workers in Britain

We use household panel data to explore the wage returns associated with training incidence and intensity (duration) for British employees. We find these returns differ depending on the nature of the training, who funds the training, the skill levels of the recipient (white- or blue-collar), the age of the employee and if the training is with the current employer or not. Using decomposition analysis, training is found to be positively associated with wage dispersion: a virtuous circle of wage gains and training exists in Britain but only for white-collar employees.

Household Asset‐Holding Diversification in Australia

We explore asset holding diversification by Australian households, in particular, the household asset diversification participation decision (whether or not to diversify at all) is jointly estimated with the decision of how much to diversify. In so doing, recent literature on the modelling of proportions is combined with the growing body of research concerning household financial decision making. Our findings are consistent with the participation of households operating in diverse financial markets being constrained by ineffective information conduits, influencing the decision of whether or not to diversify. We further find that short term concerns over job security or health are associated with less participation in, as well as a lower extent of, asset holding diversification.