Gender stereotyping and wage discrimination among Italian graduates

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Tab. 10 - Gender pay gap between graduates with excellent educational performance and total
graduates

However, our data also show that signalling activities such as an excellent educational performance
can reduce ambiguity in personnel evaluation and help counteract the effect of stereotyping, since
achieving the maximum degree mark reduces the unexplained component of the gender pay gap
(from 88% to 57%).

Conclusions

By estimating the earnings equation for male and female employees working in full-time status
three years after graduation we find a gender wage gap of 11%, and even controlling for a lot of
individuals and jobs characteristics, whose effects may be part of the explanation of pay disparity,
the unexplained component due to differences in returns to observed characteristics remains
nevertheless high (near to 88% in our data).

We check the adequacy of the data to explain the differences in wages other than the gender gap,
and by comparing several types of wage differentials (Public versus Private sector, Self-
employment versus Employees, Permanent versus Temporary contracts, and so on) we find that the
gender gap is by far the most unexplained among the above considered groups.

We wonder what unobserved something is it that can’t be measured, is correlated with sex, and
explains more of a pay disparity that known determinants of earnings such as education and work
experience, and we hypothesize that the effects of gender discrimination may be an important cause
of the unexplained component of the gender pay gap.

Since new entrants to the labor market in the mid-2000s grew up in a society which encouraged
them to take equal opportunities for granted, it is tempting for young graduates of today to believe
that discrimination is a thing of the past. Yet, even today, employment decisions based on gender
rather than on the specific work performance may prevent many women from advancing in their
careers, and even being excellent at school does not ensures that a woman will be rewarded as an
equivalently performing man.

In the Oaxaca- Blinder approach, discrimination is defined as the difference between the observed
gender pay gap and the gender pay gap that would prevail if men and women were paid according
to the same criteria. Thus, empirical evidence showing wage disparity greater than productivity

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