On Gender Inequality on the Labour Market and the Benefits of Job Flexibility

The first chapter enquires economic inequalities between men and women from a theoretical point of view, the second from an empirical point of view. In the third chapter, I relied on standard macro-indicators, as made available by Eurostat and on specific micro-indicators of gender inequality, namely: the ESG. In the last chapter, I proposed a solution for the closure of the gender pay gap, relying on Goldin’s intuition about the linearity of earnings (2014). Becker’s model of allocation of effort (195) argued that some leisure activities (e.g. sleep) are more energy producing than energy consuming, while housework and the care of children are more energy consuming. Since women are typically responsible for the latter kind of activities, they will economize on their use of energy by looking for not effort-intensive jobs. Because the effect of increased market human capital on wage rates depends on the energy spent on each hour worked, fathers’ earnings will be higher than mothers’. Bergmann’s crowding model (1971) claims that marginal productivity (i.d. wages) in the female occupation is lower than in the male one and the female occupation is overcrowded. By shifting some female labour to the other occupation, total output would increase. Beside, discriminatory policies can be successful only when the group discriminated against is well-defined and right-sized. Choosing to exclude a group too large or too small causes profit-takers to fail in improving their welfare from the one they could achieve in a non-discriminatory regime. Next,I engage in a quick overview of gender inequality across the EU-27. I analyse the role played by the EU favouring the achievement of higher gender equality through the introduction of specific policies. An important caveat is introduced, as parental leaves and public childcare are associated with higher female earnings only when cultural support for female employment is high (Budig et al., 2012). In the third chapter, ESG criteria are introduced as indicators of of gender equality at microlevel. These are financial indicator integrating Environment (E), Social (S) and Governance (G) evaluations in the investment decision-making process (Forstater & Zhang, 2016). Gender diversity can be evaluated by means of (S) and (G) and to prove this, I drew a comparison between North and South European firms. I developed a dataset of 20.000 observations for companies across 12 countries 1 and downloaded several indicators of gender equality from Bloomberg (e.g. equal opportunity policies; number of female executives or directors or CEO: the gender pay gap breakout; fair remuneration policy; the presence of CSR sustainability Committee). I also relied on a stepwise regression as available on R to enquire the relationship between female presence or gender diversity in a company and overall ESG scores. Typically, female presence favours the establishment of CSR sustainability Committee (e.g. Li et al., 2017). In addition, gender diversity favours higher financial returns for the company (e.g. Wilson & Altanlar, 2009). Both intuition were proved by my dataset. Finally, Goldin (2014) claimed that if firms were not incentivized to disproportionately reward individuals who labour long hours and work particular hours, the gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether. She argued for changes on the labour market, especially in the way jobs are structured and remunerated so to enhance temporal flexibility. In line with her intuition, I proposed a Common EU framework where specific targets ensuring at least some level of temporal job flexibility across all occupations would be set. To monitor the level of flexibility offered by a company, ESG indicators ought to be used.