Topic Gender

The German Financial Sector: Male Dominance in Top Decision-Making Bodies Remains Pervasive

In the German financial sector, the majority of employees are women, but it is still men who hold the top positions. With women making up only 4.2 percent of the boards of the largest banks and savings banks, they were still vastly underrepresented at the end of 2012 (up 1 percentage point from the end of 2011). The story is similar on the boards of the major insurance companies. The situation is somewhat ...

Wealth Distribution within Couples and Financial Decision Making

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...

Top down or Bottom up? A Cross-National Study of Vertical Occupational Sex Segregation in 12 European Countries

The "Bomb" Risk Elicitation Task

This paper presents the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), an intuitive procedure aimed at measuring risk attitudes. Subjects decide how many boxes to collect out of 100, one of which containing a bomb. Earnings increase linearly with the number of boxes accumulated but are zero if the bomb is also collected. The BRET requires minimal numeracy skills, avoids truncation of the data, allows to precisely ...

Shall I Help You My Dear? Examining Variations in Social Support for Career Advancement within Partnerships

Strong gender inequalities persist in the career advancement of men and women. Vertical and horizontal dimensions of segregation, gender role beliefs, and the public provision of welfare services all provide explanations for gender inequalities. Much less is known about the social mechanisms at work within couples, however. Following the notion of linked lives, the present study investigates the provision ...

Women in Economic Decision Making in Germany

The Intergenerational Transmission of Occupational Preferences, Segregation, and Wage Inequality: Empirical Evidence from Three Countries

Based on longitudinal data (CNEF 1980-2010) the paper analyzes the structuring effects of individual and family background characteristics on occupational preferences, and the influence of occupational segregation on gender wage differentials in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Notwithstanding the country differences concerning welfare state regimes, institutional settings of the labor ...

Getting back into the Labor Market: The Effects of Start-up Subsidies for Unemployed Females

A shortage of skilled labor and low female labor market participation are problems many developed countries have to face. Beside activating inactive women, one possible solution is to support the re-integration of unemployed women. Due to female-specific labor market constraints (preferences for exible working hours, discrimination), this is a difficult task, and the question arises whether active ...

Gender Differences in Residential Mobility: The Case of Leaving Home in East Germany

This paper investigates gender differences in the spatial mobility of young adults when initially leaving their parental home. Using individual data from 11 waves (2000-2010) of the SOEP, we examine whether female home leavers in East Germany move across greater distances than males and whether these differences are explained by the gender gap in education. Our results reveal that female home leavers ...

For Some Mothers More than Others: How Children Matter for Labour Market Outcomes When Both Fertility and Female Employment Are Low

We estimate the causal relationship between family size and labour market outcomes for families in low fertility and low female employment regime. Family size is instrumented using twinning and gender composition of the first two children. Among families with at least one child we identify the average causal effect of an additional child on mother's employment to be -7.1 percentage points. However, ...