Simon Janssen

Discriminatory Social Attitudes and Varying Gender Pay Gaps within Firms

This study analyzes the relationship between discriminatory social attitudes toward gender equality and firms’ pay-setting behavior by combining information about regional votes on constitutional amendments on equal rights for women and men with a large data set of multi-establishment firms and workers. The results show a strong relationship between discriminatory social attitudes toward gender equality and gender pay gaps within firms across regions. The results remain robust, even when the authors account for detailed worker and job characteristics and for regional sorting of firms. Overall, the results suggest that gender pay gaps are larger in regions where more people oppose gender equality rights. In other words, in the same firm women earn lower wages than their male coworkers in regions where more people have discriminatory social attitudes toward gender equality.

Occupational Stereotypes and Gender‐Specific Job Satisfaction

Using representative data containing information on job satisfaction and worker’s gender-specific prejudices, we investigate the relationship between stereotyping and job satisfaction. We show that women in stereotypically male jobs are significantly less satisfied with their work climate and job contents than in stereotypically female jobs but more satisfied with their income in those same jobs. Our findings indicate that women trade-off their higher income satisfaction against the negative consequences of stereotyping. As long as we take into account that stereotypically male jobs are physically more demanding than stereotypically female jobs, men are generally more satisfied with stereotypically male jobs.

Effects of Training on Employee Suggestions and Promotions: Evidence from Personnel Records

We evaluate the effects of employer-provided formal training on employee suggestions for productivity improvements and on promotions among male blue-collar workers. Using more than 20 years of personnel data of four entry cohorts in a German company, we address issues such as unobserved heterogeneity and the length of potential training effects. Our main finding is that workers are more likely to make suggestions and to be promoted after they have received formal training. However, the effect on suggestions is only short term. Promotion probabilities are greatest directly after training, but also seem to be affected in the long term.

Social Attitudes on Gender Equality and Firms' Discriminatory Pay-Setting

This study analyzes the relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and the variation of within-firm pay gaps by combining data on regional votes on gender equality laws with a data set of multi-establishments firms and their workers. The data set allows us for the first time to study gender pay gaps within the same firm across establishments located in regions with varying discriminatory social attitudes. Our results show that firms have larger pay gaps in regions with stronger discriminatory social attitudes. This result remains robust when we account for detailed worker and job characteristics and prevails for different subsamples. Thus we show that a relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and gender pay gaps prevails even after accounting for the sorting of women and men into different firms and occupations.