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Since the 2008 global crisis, financial literacy has come into the spotlight, but the available definitions are of theoretical nature addressing major issues appeared in specific economies, as presented here through an in-depth analysis of the literature. While the common focus has been on the United States, the economic infrastructure of Europe is very diverse. Despite the global epidemic of the crisis, its pattern was not globally the same. Utilising the current definitions without considering their validity has caused a misconception for inspecting emerging problems. Therefore, a new definition of financial literacy is proposed, which can be universally applied to various types of economies. The approach is to find the appropriate perspective for tailoring the framework of financial literacy for specific environments. Applying this definition to typical cases revealed that some of the key problems discussed in the literature are not indeed the critical issues, while major problems are usually neglected. The best example is the case of the gender gap where we might need to find new solutions as most of the previous studies have been based on inappropriate (or at least less practical) premises.

Fintech promises to spur financial inclusion and close the gender gap in access to financial services. Using novel survey data for 28 countries, this paper finds a large 'fintech gender gap': while 29% of men use fintech products and services, only 21% of women do. The gap is present in almost every country in our sample. Country characteristics and several individual-level controls explain about a third of the unconditional gap. Gender differences in the willingness to use new financial technology or fintech entrants if they offer cheaper services account for over half of the remaining gap. The paper concludes by suggesting potential explanations for the gender gap and implications for challenges in fostering financial inclusion with new technology.

The aim of this paper is to study the gender pension gap in Europe based on the newest EU-SILC data from the 2018 wave. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, it provides evidence on factors shaping the gender pension gap in a large number of EU countries. Second, it analyses the relationship between the pension gap and: (1) the coverage of occupational (second pillar) pensions and (2) gender attitudes. The main factor contributing to gender inequality in pension income is the number of years in employment. The influence of tertiary education is in the direction of increasing the gap, while the effect is the opposite when the hourly labor income gap is considered. The higher coverage of occupational pensions corresponds to a higher gender pension gap. This implies that the privatization of pension plans can lead to the conversion of a wage gap into a pension income gap and reinforces women’s disadvantage after retirement. In addition, a positive relationship is observed between unexplained portions of the pension income gap and the labor income gap. This could justify the hypothesis that unexplained portions are formed by the same factors persistent over time. One such factor could be gender norms; it has been found that countries with more gender equality support have lower unexplained portions of the labor income and pension gaps.

Housing wealth represents the dominant form of savings for American households. Using detailed data on housing transactions across the United States since 1991, we find that single men earn 1.5 percentage points higher unlevered returns per year on housing relative to single women. The gender gap grows significantly larger after accounting for mortgage borrowing: men earn 7.9 percentage points higher levered returns per year relative to women. Approximately 45% of the gap in housing returns can be explained by gender differences in the location and timing of transactions. The remaining gap arises primarily from gender differences in execution prices: data on repeat sales reveal that women buy the same property for approximately 2% more and sell for 2% less. Women experience worse execution prices because of differences in the choice of initial list price and negotiated discount relative to the list price. Gender differences in upgrade and maintenance rates, and preferences for housing characteristics and listing agents appear to be less important factors. Overall, the gender gap in housing returns is economically large and can explain 30% of the gender gap in wealth accumulation at retirement. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

This paper studies how fiscal decentralization aects local services. It exploits a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by introducing a local property tax. The identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the degree of decentralization stemming from Allied bombings during WWII. Decentralization reduced overall spending, but expanded municipal services, such as nursery schools. These effects are larger in areas with higher political competition. The paper also investigates how these changes in local services aected the labor markets. Decen- tralization, likely through expanded nursery schools, increased female labor supply, reducing the gender gap in employment.

This paper provides an extension to the literature on gender differences in preferences by analyzing the international distribution of gender differences in preferences and their determinants with an economical approach. Based on the INTRA survey the international distribution of gender differences across 53 countries and the influence of its country level of economic development, gender equality and culture are elaborated. Results provide further evidence on the existence of a gender gap in preferences shaping financial decision-making. Generally, all findings are in line with the newest research, yet broadens the discussion by introducing further country- and cultural-factors. The paper provides evidence that this variation can be partly explained by the role of economic development, gender equality, and culture.

Despite the vast literature on the gender disparities in the labor market participation and outcomes, there is a scarce literature on the gender gap in total income. This paper tries to fill the research gap and has threefold contribution to the existing literature. First, the paper studies the gender gap in aggregate income instead of focusing only one component – wages. Second, the analysis of the gap in four age categories reveals how the income gap behaves throughout the “life-cycle”. And three, the gap is analysed in 25 countries that allows observing the institutional differences that are not apparent in case of single-country study. In most countries the unexplained median total income gap is the lowest among the youngest and increases throughout the life-cycle. However, there are countries, where the gap peaks in the youngest age group, for example, in Bulgaria. There is a large heterogeneity among countries in the unexplained gap size. Among the working age people, the unexplained median income gap is above 70% in Greece, while the lowest gap, approximately 4%, is reported in Slovenia. The paper suggests that trade union membership reduces and minimum wages increase the unexplained income gap of low-income individuals below age 45. More generous maternity leave increases it for low-income individuals between age 25-44, while formal child-care has negative impact throughout the distribution for the oldest. The analysis shows that "one-size-fits-all" policies are unable to respond adequately the gender gap issue in different income sources.

This paper provides new evidence of gender differences in retaliatory behavior. Using game show data from a natural setting where stakes are high, we ask whether men are more likely to retaliate following an attack and whether the gender of the target matters for this decision. The behavior studied in this paper is the decision of whom to send the question to in a quiz show setting. We observe a 23 percent gender gap in the propensity to retaliate: women are less likely to seek revenge. The gender of the target matters for women but not for men, with women being more likely to retaliate against men than women. In addition, we show that retaliation is a successful way to avert future attacks in the short term. This is especially true for women, yet we find that women seek less revenge than men.

Women entrepreneurs have made some progress in obtaining venture capital funding, yet a wide gender gap exists. No uniform metrics or standardized criteria to identify and differentiate between women’s leadership roles in VC funded companies currently exists. Potential investors who are interested in gender impact are uncertain about the differences between VC fund managers gender diversity performance within their firm portfolios. Introducing transparent and uniform assessments for women’s leadership would address imperfect information by providing a tracking mechanism for identifying gender-oriented funds through their actions and not solely by their intentions. This paper introduces standardized definitions for women’s leadership in terms of: women-led, women-founded and women-managed. A number of studies have assessed a specific form of women’s leadership such as women-founded companies, yet no study to date has assessed and compared all three dimensions of women’s leadership. This paper also introduces a methodology and constructs an index to uniformly compare VC firm portfolio companies according to all three dimensions of women’s leadership.

Grades are one of the most important factors in the transition between different levels of education. However, conditional on cognitive skills, grades differ substantially between girls and boys. This gender disparity in grade assignments according to cognitive skills may create asymmetrical signals of the probability of admission for girls and boys. This paper examines the role of grades in explaining the gender difference in application rates to selective schools. Using data about transition from primary to selective schools in the Czech Republic, the paper shows that girls apply at significantly higher rates. This difference remains the same after controlling for probability of admission. Test scores collected by an international testing program have no effect on gender differences in applications that are, however, explained by grades. This finding is consistent with grades acting as a signal that provides imperfect and incomplete information about the probability of being admitted, and consequently causes the gender difference in application.

To read the most recent version of the discussion paper click here . The provision of non-pecuniary incentives in education is a topic that has received much scholarly attention lately. Our paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the effectiveness of grade incentives in increasing student performance. We perform a direct comparison of the two most commonly used grading practices: the absolute (i.e., criterion-referenced) and the relative (i.e., norm-referenced) grading schemes in a large-scale field experiment at a university. We hypothesize that relative grading, by creating a rank-order tournament in the classroom, provides stronger incentives for male students than absolute grading. In the full sample, we find weak support for our hypothesis. Among the more motivated students we find evidence that men indeed score significantly higher on the test when graded on a curve. Female students, irrespective of their motivation, do not increase their scores under relative grading. Since women slightly outperform men under absolute grading, grading on a curve actually narrows the gender gap in performance.

This paper makes three contributions to the existing literature. First, it provides descriptive evidence on gender differentials by education level in the US labor market over the last twenty years. Second, it uses the structural estimation of a search model of the labor market to identify and quantify the impact of employers' prejudice on labor market gender differentials. Third, it connects both the descriptive and the analytical findings to recent policy interventions in the US labor market and presents some policy experiments. The results show that prejudice may still have a role in explaining the evidence on gender differentials and there is at least one scenario where the possibility of the presence of prejudiced employers in the labor market has substantial effects. In particular, it is responsible for the reversal of the returns to schooling ranking in recent years and it may explain up to 44% of the gender wage gap of the top education group (Master and PhD) in 2005. Since prejudice is still important, policy interventions may be effective in attaining both efficiency and welfare gains. The paper is in favor of implementing an affirmative action policy because it is frequently able to close the gender gap without reducing overall welfare and because it is effective in targeting the group that should take center stage in the future debate about gender differentials: high-skilled, high-earners workers, who also have family responsibilities.

The present paper examines the historical development in the structure of the family in terms of marriage, divorce, fertility and labor 1886-2007 in order to map quantitative changes. The paper draws new information from novel Norwegian data. Along with the changing family relations we also quantify the closing of the gender gap by converging trends for both labor participation rates and wages. The paper concludes that there is a clear correspondence between gender convergence in the labor market and less stable family relations.

In a recent paper, Ichino and Moretti (2009) present evidence from a large Italian bank that much of the gap in absenteeism between women and men can be explained by absences with a 28-day cycle. These cyclical absences are interpreted as an effect of menstruation which can explain 14% of the gender earnings gap. While the health consequences of menstruation are undeniable, the general importance of menstruation in explaining gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings is unclear. In this paper, we show that 28-day cycles do not explain any of the gender gap in absences among teachers in the New York City public schools. Our results suggest that menstruation may not be an important determinant of absences for a large segment of the female labor force and that institutions greatly influence how biological gender differences affect labor market outcomes.

PurposeThe paper's aim is to study the determinants of gender differences in early career in Mongolia, one of the 50 poorest countries of the world.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis takes advantage of an ad hoc school to work survey (SWTS) on young people aged 15‐29 years carried out in 2006. Extended and augmented Mincerian earning equations are run and then the Juhn‐Murphy‐Pierce (JMP) decomposition method is applied to them to disentangle the quantity effect, the price effect and the residual wage distribution.FindingsOn average, female wages are not lower than those of males. However, although not statistically significant among teenagers (15‐19), the conditional gender gap becomes significant and sizeable for the over‐20s. The JMP decomposition shows that most of the gap is due to differences in the way the market values the same characteristics of men and women: in fact, quantity effects tend to reduce, whereas price effects tend to increase the gap. If wages were paid equally, women should have 11.7 per cent more for their higher education attainment and overall 22 per cent more, a substantial gap for the low earnings of Mongolians.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should assess the impact of aspirations of young people on their labour market choices.Practical implicationsThe analysis shows that gender differences emerge in concomitance with women establishing a household and giving birth, suggesting that the current interventions to help mothers cope with maternity are insufficient. Changing this outcome is important to reach the Millennium Development Goals.Originality/valueLabour market issues in Mongolia are under‐studied, not to mention gender differences in early career. This paper fills some of the gaps.

Using data on Executive Compensation from Standard and Poor's ExecuComp, this paper explores the gender gap in top executive jobs and the effect of women CEOs, Chairs, and Directors on the pay of other women executives. The results show a narrowing of the uncorrected gender pay gap from the mid-1990s. Women top executives earn between 8% to 25% less than male executives after controlling for differences in company size, occupational title, and industry. The magnitude of the gender pay gap is statistically related to the gender of the Chief Executive and Corporate Board Chair. Women CEO and Board Chairs bring more top women and at higher pay than is found in non-women-led firms. Specifically, female executives in women-led firms earn between 10-20% more than comparable executive women in male-led firms and are between 3-18% more likely to be among the highest five paid executives in these firms as well. The paper thereby provides strong empirical evidence that women leaders are associated with positive outcomes for women executives in substantive and important ways.

This paper uses individual-level data from Lebanon to test whether there is a difference between the education gender gap of Muslims and Christians. The paper starts by observing that, in Lebanon, the education gender gap completely disappears for cohorts born after the mid 1950s. The paper conjectures that this was related to the civil war that, rather than cutting the supply of schooling, reduced high school enrollment of boys who were engaged in fighting (or emigrated). Next, the paper uses data for young Lebanese and shows that, other things equal, girls (both Muslim and Christian) tend to receive more education than boys and that there are no differences between the gender gap of Muslims and Christians. Therefore, the paper finds no support for the hypothesis that Muslims discriminate against female education.

This paper exploits a rich collection of household surveys to investigate the wage differential between the public and private sectors in 17 Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The paper also studies how the sector of employment affects the gender wage gap. The paper finds very small premia for male workers and large and significant premia for female workers. The paper also finds that, on average, Latin American women earn 30 percent less than men with similar skills and that approximately one third of this gender gap results from lack of access to formal sector employment.

This paper aims to analyze the gender behavior in the Brazilian labor market due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus is on the jobs destruction or creation during the lockdown and social distancing implementations, covering the behavior all months of 2020. For this, we use the New General Register of Employed and Unemployed (NCAGED) and apply the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition between the female and male net destruction jobs at municipal levels, considering individuals with 18 to 40 years. Furthermore, we verify the inequality for every month of 2020, pre-and post-implemented in pandemic context. We found evidence that the initial months were harmful to all formal workers but had even greater weight on women. Thus, another relevant contribution is in the inequality decomposition, where the findings show that it is largely due to structural effects.

This paper investigates the effect of stereotypical beliefs of teachers on learning outcomes of secondary school students in India. We measure teacher's bias through an index capturing teacher's subjective beliefs about the role of gender and other characteristics in academic performance. We tackle the potential endogeneity of teacher's subjective beliefs by controlling for teacher fixed effects in a value-added model that includes lagged test score of students. We find that a standard deviation increase in biased attitude of the math teacher widens the female disadvantage in math performance by 0.07 standard deviation over an academic year. This negative effect of biased teachers is significant only for male teachers. The effect is especially strong among the medium-performing students and in classes where the majority of students are boys. Moreover, among the medium-performing students, having a female teacher significantly reduces the gender gap in math performance. As a plausible mechanism, we show that biased teachers negatively affect girls' attitude towards math as compared to boys. Unlike math outcome, we do not find any significant effect when we analyze the effect of biased English teachers on English scores of the same students.

Russian Abstract:В данной работе представлены результаты исследования связей между гендерным разрывом в ОПЖ, с одной стороны, и различиями в ценностных установках на здоровый образ жизни между мужчинами и женщинами, с другой. English Abstract:This paper presents the results of a study of the links between the gender gap in life expectancy, on the one hand, and differences in value attitudes towards a healthy lifestyle between men and women, on the other.

This paper presents one of the first studies of the political behavior of female members of China's national legislature---the National People's Congress (NPC). Female legislators have consistently held about 20% of seats in the NPC in the past two decades because of a gender quota, but they sponsor about 44% of all legislative bills and more than half of bills relevant to women's rights and interests in the 12th NPC. Among sponsors, women on average sponsor more bills (4.8 bills) than men (3.1 bills). We propose three potential mechanisms that drive women's comparative productiveness: (i) women are more collaborative than their male colleagues; (ii) the gender quota and non-Communist Party quota produce a particularly active female group; and (iii) female leadership encourages female participation. We next analyze 2,365 bills submitted during the 12th NPC and show that female legislators are not only more engaged in women's issues; they are also disproportionately more active than men in the traditionally "male-dominated'' areas including economics and finance, foreign affairs, rural affairs and environmental issues. Our findings suggest that a socialist legacy alone does not narrow the political gender gap; underrepresented regime outsiders (women) have strategically used the ``double-quota'' system and collaborated to carve out a place to amplify their voices, outperform insiders, and shape the policy debate.

This paper examines gender differences in estimating the salaries from job offers after the pay transparency reform in Austria, which aims to reduce the gender pay gap by mandating employers to disclose the minimum salary and negotiation options in their job offers. We address common salary offers in the pharmaceutical industry, where market salaries are substantially higher than the minimum salary. An experiment is conducted with 385 graduate students who estimate the negotiable salary for six salary offers of a chosen job. Our results show that, when salary offers are based on minimum salaries, initial gender differences in estimates remain, irrespective of whether the salary is negotiable or not. When a salary-range is shown, however, gender differences disappear completely. The results imply that, reducing the gender gap in salary estimates in asymmetric labor markets necessitates employers to include not only negotiation options, but also the salary range in their job offers.

This paper examines the impact of counter-stereotypical female role models on women's labor supply and occupational choices. Using hand-collected data from Gallup surveys that cover a long time series, we create a direct measure of counter-stereotypical female role models based on the fraction of local survey respondents who admire famous women in business, politics, or science. We show that the presence of counter-stereotypical female role models is associated with more women participating in the labor market, working in male-dominated industries, choosing occupations with abstract tasks, and taking managerial positions, which eventually alleviates the gender pay gap.

We investigate whether the gender gap in economic publications can be explained by different submission strategies of male and female economists. We conduct an online survey among early-career economics faculty of top 50 institutions focusing on the submission trajectories of job market papers as well as personal and institutional characteristics. Our results suggest that there are no significant differences in submission strategies for this early-career sample.

Gender differences in competitive environments have been studied extensively; however, the majority of literature concerns activities with an objective winner. In this paper, we examine gender differences in high school Public Forum debate, a two vs. two activity where judges subjectively decide the winner. We constructed a dataset with 44 variables and 125,087 unique debate rounds during the 2014-2015 to 2019-2020 school years. Using logistic modeling, we document a large difference in win rates between teams of different gender compositions, with female-female teams 17.1% less likely and male-female teams 10.0% less likely to win a debate round against male-male teams. However, there is no gender gap in win rates for novice debaters, suggesting that the disparity does not occur from innate entry ability differences but rather appears alongside experience in debate. We also find a large difference in participation rates between female and male students, which begins at the 9th grade level and is exacerbated over time due to female debaters being 30.34% more likely to quit than male debaters. Finally, we find that a higher ratio of female to male debaters from the same school reduces attrition rates of female debaters.

Willingness-to-compete experiments typically use small stakes, which raises the question of whether the commonly observed lower competitiveness of women can be generalized to consequential real-world situations. The present paper examines gender differences in willingness to compete using a high-stakes TV game show. At several stages of an elimination competition, contestants face a choice between continuing to compete and opting out in exchange for a comparatively modest prize. When strategic considerations are absent, we observe the well-known pattern that women are less likely to compete than men, but this difference derives entirely from women avoiding competition against men. When the decision is strategic and contestants should factor in the competitiveness of others, women again avoid competing against men. Men then seem to anticipate the lower competitiveness of female opponents, as evidenced by their greater tendency to compete against women. Ability differences are unlikely to explain these results. These findings show that the gender difference in willingness to compete also occurs in a setting with exceptionally high stakes, and underline the importance of the gender of competitors, a factor mostly ignored in the literature. Our results are particularly relevant for understanding and addressing the persistent gender gap at the male-dominated higher rungs of the career ladder.

This paper represents the empirical analysis of existing gender differentiation in labour income in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Research is performed on micro data of annual tests of households conducted by the Committee on Statistics of the Ministry of the National Economy of the Republic Kazakhstan. On the whole, scales of gender differences in wages in the Kazakhstan labour market are comparable with similar evaluations in other countries. In Kazakhstan, the proportion of wages of women to men is 69%. For the last 15 years, the reduction of difference in the salary, by gender, was caused by changes in the gender structure of employment. The results of the evaluation of the segregation indexes testify about the recess of the situation connected with segregation of the labour market in Kazakhstan. A decomposition of the distinction in annual average labour incomes between men and women, carried out by the method of Oaxaka-Blinder, showed that gender segregation explains that more than thirds of observable differences in wages between men and women. This is not offset by the higher level of accumulated human capital of women. However, 80% of gender distinctions in wages remain unexplained, apart from being related to the existing discrimination against women in the labour market in Kazakhstan.

This paper examines whether the gender gap in entrepreneurship can be attributed to frictions in credit markets to women of childbearing age. Access to reproductive care affects women's trade-off between family and career. Better access to reproductive care reduces women's risk of unintended pregnancy and increases female-led businesses' survival. The reduced risk enables women to raise more capital and open more firms. I utilize the introduction of policies limiting access to reproductive care and show that they lead to limited utilization of credit, widen the gender gap in entrepreneurship, and diminish potential economic growth.

A prominent finding in the literature on gender competition is that women are less inclined to compete in comparison to men. In this paper, we conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the relevance of beliefs about the sex of potential competitors on men’s and women’s decision to enter competition. Specifically, we test whether women have a weaker preference to compete per se, or rather just shy away from competing against men. The results support the latter hypothesis. When given the possibility of choosing a competitor’s sex, or when being in the lab surrounded only by female participants, the percentage of women entering competition is high and similar to the figures commonly reported for men. Moreover, only women are sensitive to the different cues we provide about the sex of potential competitors, and their competitiveness is largely driven by their beliefs about other women’s competitive attitude. These findings have distinctive policy implications for the labor markets in which women are underrepresented. Above all, we argue that on-going interventions that highlight women’s underrepresentation in job advertisements, which are intended to encourage women to apply, could be triggering the opposite effect. Instead, we advocate a nudge in the form of persuasive references to recent female applicants and/or existing female workers.

There is evidence of a gender gap in access to finance. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that corruption discourages more female than male entrepreneurs from applying for credit. We use data on access to credit and corruption at the firm level for a large dataset of firms from 68 countries worldwide. We demonstrate that female entrepreneurs are more discouraged by corruption to ask for credit than male borrowers. We find evidence for three explanations for the gendered impact of corruption on borrower discouragement: women-managed firms suffer more from corruption than men-managed firms, women have less experience in management than men and as such can have less experience to deal with corruption, and gender inequality in society enhances the discouragement of female borrowers. Thus, our findings provide evidence that corruption enhances the gender gap in access to finance, enhancing gender inequality in participation in economic activity.

This paper provides novel evidence that female politicians increase the proportion of US government procurement contracts allocated to women-owned firms. The identification strategy uses close elections for the US House of Representatives. The effect concentrates in local contractors and persists after the female’s politician departure. The more gender-balanced representation in government contracting does not seem to be associated with economic costs, as the firm characteristics of the average contractor and contract performances are unchanged. By analyzing congressional requests from legislators to federal agencies, we show that female politicians affect procurement contract allocation through individual oversight.

Broadening the base of players who contribute to innovation is the key to creating and expanding the innovation ecosystem. In an endeavor to increase the contribution of minorities in the IP field (e.g., startups, women inventors, and women entrepreneurs) to innovation, there is an urgent need to mitigate the invisible barriers and create an environment that allows them to demonstrate their capabilities. This paper focuses on women inventors and analyzes the challenges and countermeasures. Although the number of women in science and engineering fields and entrepreneurs is steadily increasing, the number of women inventors is not rising as much as it should be. As a background, it turns out that there is a persistent gender gap in the acquisition and enforcement of patent rights. To broaden women’s activities in the field of intellectual property (IP), the cooperation of men is essential, as opportunities for joint research between men and women are growing. This analysis is based on assumed gender because patent applications do not contain gender information. The advent of more accurate methods for guessing gender information in the IP field will enable more precise analysis.

This paper examines the role of information and regulatory interventions in mitigating the executive gender pay gap. We find female executives are paid about 34 per cent less compared to equivalent males from the same cohort, which falls by half over tenure within the company, but remains systematically significant throughout. The gender pay gap is the highest for young female executives and in the financial sector. Both demand-side (board gender quotas) and supply-side (family policies) regulatory interventions are associated with a lower gender gap in executive pay. Board gender quotas are associated with lower gender pay gap for experienced female executives in the highest age bracket. In contrast, supply-side interventions are associated with lower gender pay gap for the youngest female executives. Our results have important implications for the relative effectiveness of public policies that aim to reduce gender imbalance in corporate leadership.

In the Philippines, more than half of new businesses in 2017 are by women. While this is a reflection of equality in opportunities between the sexes, the more critical issue for women entrepreneurs is to stay in business and scale up. Using a survey data from 480 SME respondents from Metro Manila, Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, and Quezon, the study compared 213 women-owned SMEs or WSMEs and 267 men-owned SMEs in terms of: 1) obstacles and enablers for scaling up; and 2) gender gap in accessing factors to scaling-up of SMEs. Findings show that both gender experience similar top constraints and enablers. However, analysis shows that significant gender gap exists in terms of linkages with large and foreign firms – a factor that is associated with WSMEs likelihood to plan to export. An important contribution of this paper to the literature is in testing the relationship between scaling-up of female-owned SMEs and scaling-up factors in terms of 1) loan acquisition; 2) expansion; 3) linkages to large and 4) foreign firms; 5) innovation; and 6) use of technology. WSMEs able to scale up in the last two years are more likely to be linked to foreign firms and use technology compared with WSMEs not able to scale up. Although the barriers faced by women-owned SMEs are related to those by men-owned SMEs, findings show significant differences in their reasons for not accessing or engaging various factors to scaling-up such as loans, innovation, expansion, and exporting. These differences in emphasis on what confronts women-owned SMEs more than men have policy implications for government and other business agencies to understand scaling-up factors and barriers of women-owned SMEs.

We study the effect of preferences for boys on the performance in mathematics of girls, using evidence from two different data sources. In our first set of results, we identify families with a preference for boys by using fertility stopping rules in a large population of households whose children attend public schools in Florida. Girls growing up in a boy-biased family score on average 3 percentage points lower on math tests when compared to girls raised in other types of families. In our second set of results, we find similar effects when we study the correlations between girls’ performance in mathematics and maternal gender role attitudes, using evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We conclude that socialization at home can explain a non-trivial part of the observed gender disparities in mathematics performance and document that maternal gender attitudes correlate with those of their children, supporting the hypothesis that preferences transmitted through the family impact children behavior.

The paper, using data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth, estimates the intrahousehold distribution of wealth. On the basis of reconstructed data, a large gap between men and women emerges, greater for financial assets than for real assets and in particular for real estate. This gap, smaller among young people, increases with age; it is decreasing over time, but has remained significant in recent years. Gini concentration indices computed on individual net wealth are far greater than those calculated on household wealth or per capita wealth, which shares wealth equally among household members. The trend in concentration indices, however, does not significantly change. Some regressions suggest that the observed gaps are largely attributable to gender differences in terms of age, educational qualifications, employment and income.

The within-firm gender wage gap plays an important role in understanding the overall gender gap in the labor market. This paper describes how parenthood is associated with the within-firm gender gap using a unique personnel dataset from a large Chinese company. We find that the wage gap is small in the early stages of careers and becomes more evident when female employees get married. The wage gap peaks at childbirth, returning to the pre-pregnancy level ten months afterwards. Following this stage, the wage gap gradually widens and persists. Whereas the short-term peak around childbirth can be explained by female employees' reduced working hours, the long-term trend is caused by women's concentration in lower-level jobs. Our study highlights the importance of internal gender segregation in understanding gender wage differentials.

This paper explores the contribution of biological factors in explaining gender differences in educational performance, with a particular focus on the role of prenatal testosterone. We exploit the fact that prenatal testosterone is hypothesized to transfer in-utero from a male twin to his twin sibling causing exogenous variation in exposure to prenatal testosterone in twins. By using Dutch administrative data and controlling for potential socialization effects, we find that girls with a twin brother score 7% of a standard deviation lower on math compared to girls with a twin sister. Adherence to traditional gender norms can explain this finding, implying that our results are not just driven by biology but materialize depending on environmental factors.

Is the wage penalty due to motherhood larger among highly qualified women? In this paper, we study the effect of parenthood on the careers of high-achieving women relative to high-achieving men in a set of high-earning professions with either nonlinear or linear wage structures. Using Norwegian registry data, we find that the child earnings penalty for mothers in professions with a nonlinear wage structure, MBAs and lawyers, is substantially larger than for mothers in professions with a linear wage structure. The gender earnings gap for MBA and law graduates is around 30%, but substantially less for STEM and medicine graduates, 10 years after childbirth. In addition, we provide some descriptive statistics on the role of fertility timing on the child earnings penalty.

This paper examines the drivers of female labour force participation in Indonesia and disentangles the factors that have contributed to it remaining largely unchanged for two decades at around 51%. Data from the National Socioeconomic Survey (Susenas) and the Village Potential Statistics (Podes) over the period 1996 to 2013 are used to implement a cohort analysis which separates out life-cycle effects from changes over time in women’s labour market participation. We find that the raw labour market participation figures whic show little change over time mask changes that offset one another in the current population. There is evidence of social norms changing to support women’s participation but this is offset by the effect of the changing industrial structure. Projections show that with the current policy settings Indonesia is unlikely to reach its G20 target of decreasing the gender gap in participation by 25% between 2014 and 2025.

This paper examines the dynamics of the gender gap over the high school years among high scorers on the American Mathematics Competitions. A clear gender gap is already present by 9th grade and the gender gap widens over the high school years. High-achieving students must substantially improve their performance from year to year to maintain their within-cohort rank, but there is nonetheless a great deal of persistence in the rankings. Several gender-related differences in the dynamics contribute to the widening of the gender gap, including differences in the rates with which male and female students stop participating in the contests, and in the mean and variance of year-to-year improvements among those who continue. A decomposition indicates that the most important difference is that fewer girls make large enough gains to move up substantially in the rankings. An analysis of students on the margin of qualifying for a prestigious second stage exam provides evidence of a discouragement effect: some react to falling just short by dropping out of participating in future years, and this reaction may be more common among girls.

Gender differences in the labor market can be better understood by looking at specific trends within and between each gender group. In this paper, we look specifically at income inequalities that exist between certain segments of the male and female labor force in addition to examining inequalities that exist within each gender group. Dividing male and female workers into cohorts first by age, and then by characteristics such as marital status, unionization rates, and occupational category, we find evidence to support a number of leading hypotheses that help explain the narrowing of the gender gap in the American workforce between 1979-2013.

This paper studies gender-related performance differences in competitive environments using a novel setting: high school debate tournaments. I first document large gender gaps in percentage of debates won across all debate formats and find that differences in age and prior tournament experience explain about half of the 27 percentage point gap between all-female and all-male teams. I then exploit exogenous variation in win percentage in a given year of high school caused by teams being randomly assigned judges of differing levels of "female friendliness" during that year. I use this variation to estimate the effect of win rate in a given year on a female team’s likelihood of quitting debate the following year. I find that female teams respond very strongly to win rate: A one standard deviation increase in win rate reduces the female dropout rate by 50% (15 percentage points) but has no effect for men. This difference completely eliminates the gender gap in dropout rates and suggests that women’s reactions to losses may play a key role in later outcomes. This result reinforces the need to consider gender differences in reactions to setbacks in designing solutions to gender disparities in labor markets.

Studies on financial inclusion have so far focused on understanding the determinants of overall access to finance, while a small but growing literature has attempted to study the impediments that women face when trying to access finance. This paper contributes to this literature by understanding the underlying factors of gender gaps in terms of accessing the various services provided by the financial sector, paying particular attention to the structure of the banking system and to women’s socio-economic participation. We construct a database combining information from bank-level data with other variables to examine the association between banking system ownership structure and concentration, the regulatory framework and other socio-economic variables reflecting women’s participation in the labour market and gender disparities in access to property across countries. We also compare the association of these variables with overall access to finance. A weighted least squares analysis is used to identify the correlations with the gender gaps. Our results suggest that women are more likely to be excluded from the formal financial sector in countries where: (i) laws and norms discriminate against women; (ii) women have lower participation in the labour market; and (iii) state-owned banks have a big share in the banking system.

Individuals often need to self-promote for professional recognition and career success. In this paper, we investigate the existence of a gender gap in self-promotion and its causal link with modesty norms. Using a novel experiment, we show that women are significantly less likely to self-promote relative to men. We establish that the difference in behaviour across gender is determined by women’s social-image concerns of being perceived as immodest and not because of an underlying preference for modesty. We find that the provision of a justification to self-promote has two important consequences: (i) it leads to an increase in self-promotion by women and, (ii) contributes to a reduction in the gender gap in self-promotion behaviour.

This paper studies how increases in labor standards and enforcement affect workers and their families. Using a policy in Argentina that targeted domestic workers and their employers, I find a 35% increase in formality rates of domestic workers and a 4.2% increase in monthly earnings, despite a 3.9% reduction in hours of work per week. Moreover, I find evidence that the policy had effects on the labor supply decisions of other members of the domestic workers' households: hours worked by spouses of domestic workers and the labor force participation of young adult children of domestic workers decrease after the reform, an effect driven mostly by girls. The reform also helped close the educational gender gap: school attendance and years of education increased by 3% among boys of secondary school age, and secondary school completion increased by 20% among older boys. Taken together, the results suggest that higher labor standards and their enforcement can have sizable impacts among low-skilled workers as well as their families.

Using the PISA surveys (2000-2012), this paper explores the relationship between math test scores and everyday computer gaming by gender and for high income and middle income countries. We use two identification strategies in the spirit of an ideal experiment that would reduce computer gaming through limited internet access or through schools alternative demands. We find that everyday computer gaming has positive effects for boys, but negative effects for girls arising mostly in collaborative games suggesting a role for social effects. Computer gaming is becoming the new "swimming upstream" factor in the quest to close the gender gap in math.

In this paper, I explore the short-run (one year) behavioral changes in terms of market labor, voluntary labor, as well as borrowing through formal and informal sources among Indonesian households in the aftermath of natural hazards. I estimate the predicted number of hazards, including earthquakes, foods, landslides and storms, in each of the sampled districts in each survey year using historical data from 1980 to 2008. I then match household data with the residuals from these regressions as the unexpected number of hazards. I find that women from districts with more unexpected disasters work fewer weeks on the market. Unexpected disasters are also associated with higher probabilities of borrowing and larger loans. These results suggest that the substitution effect dominates the income effect in the short run.

Gender differences in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines are widespread in most OECD countries and mathematics is the only subject where girls tend to underperform with respect to boys. This paper analyses the gender gap in math test scores in Italy, which is one of the countries displaying the largest differential between boys and girls, according to the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We use data from an Italian national level learning assessment, involving children in selected grades from second to tenth, and analyse the gender gap in mathematics test scores using OLS, school fixed effects, quantile regression, metric free and dynamic pseudo-panel models. Our results show that girls systematically underperform boys, even after controlling for an array of individual and family background characteristics. The average gender gap increases with children's age, is larger among top performing children, and girls keep losing ground relative to boys when progressing in the education system.