Understanding the gender pay gap
Subtitle: what's competition got to do with it?
By: Alan Manning and Farzad Saidi.
Contributors: Saidi, Farzad.; London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance.
Series: CEP discussion paper -- no. 898
Publisher: Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science
Published: 2008
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: A number of papers have recently argued that men and women have different attitudes and behavioural responses to competition. Laboratory experiments suggest that these gender differences are very large but it is important to be able to map these findings into real world differences. In this paper, we use performance pay as an indicator of competition in the workplace and compare the gender gap in incidence of performance pay and earnings and work effort under these contracts. Women are less likely to found in performance pay contracts but the gender gap is small. Furthermore, the effect of performance pay on earnings is modest and does not differ markedly by gender. Consequently the ability of these theories to explain the gender pay gap seems very limited.
Notes: Title from PDF file (viewed on Jan. 23, 2009).

"November 2008."

Includes bibliographical references.

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