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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.

To analyze the proportion of women presenting at 9 major ophthalmology conferences over 3 years.Retrospective observational study.Conference brochures from 9 national ophthalmology conferences from 2015 to 2017 were analyzed. Genders of first author presenters of papers and non-papers (moderators, presenters at symposia, panel discussions, workshops/instructional courses) were recorded. Comparisons were made to the gender ratio of board-certified ophthalmologists. Student t test and Cochran-Armitage trend test was used for analysis, with significance at P.05.Of 14,214 speakers, 30.5% were female, statistically higher than the expected 25.4% (P.001). Paper presenters were 33.1% female (P.001) and non-paper presenters were 28.5% female (P.001). When stratified to general or subspecialty conference, general conferences had a higher proportion of women compared to the American Board of Ophthalmology (ABO) expected rates (P.001) for paper and non-paper presentations. The rates of female presenters increased over the 3 years only at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (P = .009). Subgroup analysis showed that women presented 33.1% of papers but only 28.5% of non-paper presentations, which is lower than expected (P.001).Our results highlight positive trends: the overall proportions of female speakers exceed ABO estimates of female ophthalmologists. However, the gender gap remains at many subspecialty conferences, especially for non-papers, which are more likely to require invitations rather than being self-submitted. As demographics continue to change, further efforts are needed to assure equitable selection of conference presenters.

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.

This paper investigates the long-term effects of early-life exposure to natural disasters on a range of health and educational outcomes, utilizing the spatiotemporal variation in two large earthquakes that occurred in Myanmar in the same year as a natural experiment. The results indicate that cohorts exposed to earthquakes have a higher probability of having at least some difficulty with four activities: seeing, hearing, walking, and remembering. We adopt a battery of alternative specifications and arrive at similar results. Our further results show that earthquakes adversely impact the long-run educational attainment of individuals, exacerbating the pre-existing gender gap in schooling. The findings of this paper provide additional evidence of the importance of timely disaster management as one straightforward way to address the early-life roots of unequal opportunities.

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.

In the past few decades, the Chinese Ministry of Education has promoted “suzhi jiaoyu” (quality education) reforms. However, little is known about their impact. This paper evaluates an important component of the reforms that replaces using total scores with a letter grade system in high school admissions. I find that this change in student performance measurement achieved its intended goal of balancing learning across subjects but hindered high achievers with imbalanced performance. This paper also discusses how the measurement reform influenced the gender gap in achievements.

This paper studies the impact of the world's largest free school lunch program (Mid Day Meal Scheme) on school enrollment in India. While the program was launched nationally, its implementation has been scattered within and across states. Using an instrumental variable approach, this paper estimates local average treatment effect of receiving free meals in school on children's enrollment in primary school. The findings of this paper suggest that the mid-day meal scheme increased the probability of enrollment in primary school and on-time enrollment in first grade. An analysis of heterogeneity in results shows that the program had larger effect on socially disadvantaged groups and on girls. Specifically, the analysis found the effect of the mid-day meal program on girls to be almost twice its effect on boys for primary school enrollment, suggesting that the program had a positive impact on reducing the gender gap in school participation.

This paper examines the evolution of the statures of Spanish male and female migrants who entered Mexico between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. Using the information contained in the National Registry of Foreigners created by the Mexican government, the paper also estimates the evolution of the gap between male and female migrants’ heights. The inclusion of women and their heights in the registry allows the estimation of both male and female heights and the analysis of their evolution for a group of comparable individuals. The results show that Spanish migrants to Mexico grew taller between 1840 and 1930, and also reveal their character as a highly qualified group, with heights similar to those of the Latin-American elites and considerably higher than the statures of those who remained in Spain. In the long term, the differences between men and women decreased from more than 10 cm in the cohorts born in the mid-nineteenth century, to around 8–9 centimetres in the early twentieth century, coinciding with a period of profound economic and social transformations.

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.

The gender gap in European labour markets presents different patterns across countries and years. In the late decades, the participation of men decreased, while the participation of women increased. The recent global crisis had a different impact on the employment of men and women that is reflected by a narrower gender gap. The paper aims to analyse the variation of employment gap in EU and to identify the factors with significant influence. The data used in the paper concern the time span 2003-2012. The methods applied in the study of gender gap variation under the influence of influence factors are the analysis of variance and the fixed effects model. The results of the study prove that, after the crisis, the gender gap in employment in EU shows some convergence, though there is important variation among regions and by education levels.

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.

In this paper, we estimate the incidence of self-employment over a person’s life-cycle across different socio-economic groups and show to what extent self-employment rates differ across groups. The analysis utilizes data from the March supplements of the Current Population Survey. This paper shows that the probability of self-employment is increasing with age and education and is higher for men, whites, and married women compared to other groups. Females are less likely to be self-employed and the difference appears to widen in absolute terms over the life-cycle, but is largest in relative terms early in the life-cycle. We show that the gender gap is not due to marriage and the presence of children. The difference between an African–American male and the (white) benchmark is dramatic, particularly in a person’s middle age. In contrast, the difference between a high-school graduate and the (college educated) benchmark is relatively small and changes sign over the life-cycle. Young (age 34 or lower) high school graduates are more likely to be self-employed than otherwise identical college graduates, while the reverse is true for older individuals. The paper discusses explanations for these life-cycle profiles of self-employment.

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.

Mobility is a critical element of one's quality of life regardless of one's age. Although the challenges for women are more significant than those for men as they age, far less is known about the gender differences in mobility patterns of older adults, especially in the United States (US) context. This paper reports on a study that examined potential gender gaps in mobility patterns of older adults (aged 65 years and over) in the US by analyzing data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey. Elderly respondents were first classified into one of six clusters based on socio-demographic variables. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) was then estimated and showed that gender gaps existed in the mobility patterns of the elderly, and the differences were diverse across the different clusters. The most substantial gender gap was found in the Senior Elder with Medical Condition(s) cluster, followed by the High-income Workers cluster and the Middle-income Urban Residents cluster. In contrast, females in the Low-Income Single Elder cluster enjoyed statistically significant positive mobility differences with their male counterparts. Our results also found that female elderly in the Senior Elder with Medical Condition(s) and the Low-income Family Elder clusters suffered most after the cessation of driving, with the largest mobility gender gap in the Middle-income Urban Resident cluster. This study will help transportation planners and policymakers understand gender and other socio-demographic differences in elderly mobility. Thus, it will facilitate the development of measures to improve elderly mobility and reduce gender gaps by recognizing and addressing specific target groups' mobility characteristics and needs rather than treating the elderly as a single potential user group.

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.

The gender gap in fiction reading has been largely ignored by sociologists and scholars in the field of reading research. This paper investigates three primary explanations for why more women read fiction than men, including: the influence of childhood socialization and gender-role stereotypes, differences in cognition and prose literacy and differences in work status and available free time. Data analysis using two, large-scale national surveys reveals that notions of gender-appropriate leisure and their influence on childhood socialization explain much of the gap in fiction reading. On the other hand, differences in reading skills and free time, as measured by work-status, seem to contribute very little to our understanding of the gap. The paper concludes by suggesting that better measures of socialization, additional information about what types of books men and women read, and more detailed time-use studies would give us additional leverage on this puzzle.

The gender gap in schooling is puzzling given that the expected returns to an individual for increased schooling — as measured by proportional wage increments — does not differ by gender. This paper explores possible explanations for the disparity using a model of parental investment in children. The model allows for differences in investments due to differences in costs — including the opportunity cost of the child's labor as well as school fees and availability. Moreover, it indicates that disparities in investment could come through differences in returns realized by parents, for example, in the probability of transfers from children to parents or in the degree of sympathy or altruism, even when market returns to the children themselves do not differ. While it is difficult to distinguish these different explanations empirically, the paper reviews available evidence and indicates interventions that governments can make to reduce the gender gap in education.

Currently, the World Chess Federation lists 1,643 male Grandmasters against only 37 females. While the greater attainment of men in competitive chess is well known, the lesser known fact is that the gender gap in competitive chess varies strongly across countries. For instance, for every 100 male players with the attainment level of Candidate Master, there are about 48, 47, 38, 4, 3, and 2 female players in Vietnam, Georgia, China, US (Japan), France (Sweden), and Denmark (Finland), respectively. Noting these large gender discrepancies, this paper constructs a cross-country panel to explore the determinants of these gaps. Controlling for main economic development indicators and several measures of gender equality, a legacy of command economy is found to be the most significant predictor of a smaller gender gap in competitive chess across countries. Various explanations and their implications are discussed.

This paper empirically investigates the role of culture in explaining the frequently reported differences in financial literacy between women and men. Using nationally representative survey data from India, we find that women are significantly less financially literate than men. This gender gap is not observable, however, when we only consider matrilineal states. Moreover, matrilineal women are more financially knowledgeable than patriarchal women. Using the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method, we find that education, English language skills and the use of different information sources, such as newspapers and TV, are key transmission channels in explaining differences in financial knowledge between men and women in patriarchal states, and between patriarchal and matrilineal societies.

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.

Studies on financial inclusion have focused on the determinants of access to finance but only a few s attempted to examine the impediments that women face trying to access finance. This paper contributes to this literature by understanding the underlying factors of gender gaps in accessing finance using the World Bank Global Findex database for 141 countries over time. We also construct a database combining 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 education, income and access to property across countries. Our results suggest that women are more likely to be excluded from the financial sector in countries where: (i) foreign-owned banks have smaller presence; (ii) state-owned banks have a bigger share in the banking system; and (iii) credit information is less available through public and private credit registries, and (iv) gaps between women and men in educational attainment are large. The results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures of financial inclusion.

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 investigates the gender gap within management roles in the UK. We find that female workers are less likely to become managers than male workers because women are traditionally expected to provide the majority of care for their family. This implies that women are pressured to do more informal work than men, which limits their formal working experience and impedes their career development. We also find that the probability of becoming a manager adopts an inverted U-shape relationship with age. This likelihood of becoming a manager also increases with employment duration and educational attainment due to the accumulation of relevant experience and human capital.

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.

Women continue to be underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields. As such, there has been an increased interest in interventions to reduce bias against, and increase inclusion of, women in STEM. In this paper, we compare and contrast two commonly used strategies: awareness and blindness. We demonstrate that gender-blindness—a diversity ideology that advocates for downplaying gender differences, rather than embracing them—has the potential to diminish stereotyping of women in STEM fields. In six total studies, we show that men who believe, or are primed with, gender-blindness (compared to gender-awareness) are less likely to endorse gender stereotypes around women's STEM competencies. By measuring (Study 1) and manipulating ( Studies 2 –5) gender-blindness, we show that gender-blindness (compared to awareness) minimizes the gender gap on explicit stereotyping measures, as well as diminishes STEM stereotyping in target evaluations. Across six studies, we show the influence of diversity ideologies on stereotyping of women in STEM.

This paper provides evidence of different teenage-smoking dynamics between genders with social progression. In particular, we find that descending from more gender-equal societies makes girls relatively more prone to smoke than those from less gender-equal societies relative to their male counterparts. Using data from over 6,000 second-generation immigrant teenagers sharing culture and institutions from one host country (Spain) but coming from 45 different countries of ancestry, we find that the higher the degree of gender equality in the country of ancestry, the higher the likelihood that girls smoke relative to boys. Our result holds even after we control for parental, sibling, and peer smoking, as well as for country-of-ancestry indicators of economic development and the smoking gender gap, among others. Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Grant ECO2017-87069-P. Nuria Rodriguez-Planas acknowledges financial support from her CUNY research fund.

This paper studies how school access affects men’s fertility decisions. To separately identify the male response, we adopt a regression discontinuity approach that exploits the timing of a major expansion in school access in Mali and the country’s large gender gap in the age of marriage. Increased school access for boys led to large subsequent decreases in fertility by age 25. The effects appear to be driven by delayed marriage entry and urbanization. The study shows how failing to account for the impact of male education on fertility may lead to an underestimate of the potential for expansions in school access to stimulate demographic transition.

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.