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A brand new paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, revealed by Oxford University Press, signifies that people who find themselves the gender minority of their office usually tend to expertise sexual harassment. This harassment discourages folks from taking jobs in workplaces the place they’d be a gender minority. It additionally leads present minorities to go away their jobs for brand new ones with decrease pay.
Women and males are segregated throughout workplaces, and former analysis signifies that such segregation could clarify 15 to twenty% of the gender wage hole. Researchers right here studied how gender discrimination in work circumstances contributes to such inequality. Using data from the bi-annual Swedish Work Environment Survey, the examine reveals that girls’s and males’s harassment dangers develop with the share of opposite-sex folks of their office. Women are about thrice as possible as males to expertise sexual harassment, however in essentially the most male-dominated workplaces, they’re almost six occasions extra possible than males to take action. Meanwhile, males’s threat is sort of twice as excessive as ladies’s in essentially the most female-dominated workplaces.
The analysis used a survey experiment to measure staff’ aversion to taking jobs in workplaces the place a sexual harassment incident had occurred. Both ladies and men had a excessive aversion to jobs in such workplaces, however their aversion was thrice bigger if the harassment sufferer had the identical intercourse as themselves. These findings indicate that harassment deters ladies from taking jobs in male-dominated workplaces, the place ladies are the principle harassment victims, and vice versa for males.
Workplaces with a bigger share of males pay extra. A office with greater than 80% males gives a 9% increased wage for a similar work as a office with 80% feminine staff.
The researchers right here discover that harassment produces gender inequality by job modifications amongst harassment victims. Investigators discovered that girls who report sexual harassment are 25 % extra prone to have left for a brand new job within the three years after the harassment. Men who report sexual harassment are 15 % extra prone to have left for a brand new job. The examine signifies ladies who expertise sexual harassment usually tend to go away for a job at an organization with a decrease share of males and a decrease wage premium.
“By deterring ladies from taking jobs in male-dominated workplaces, harassment additionally retains ladies away from the highest-paying employers within the labor market, and males from the lowest-paying ones,” stated Johanna Rickne, one of many paper’s authors. “In this fashion, sexual harassment contributes to the gender wage hole.”
The dynamics of office sexual harassment within the US
More data:
Sexual harassment and gender inequality within the labor market, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2022). DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjac018
Provided by
Oxford University Press
Citation:
More gender segregation in jobs means extra harassment, decrease pay (2022, May 12)
retrieved 12 May 2022
from https://phys.org/information/2022-05-gender-segregation-jobs.html
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