Abstract
This study examines the determinants of promotions, performance evaluations and earnings using unique longitudinal data from the personnel records of a large university. The study focuses on the role of gender in remuneration using, first, information on the complexity ratings of job tasks to define promotions on job ladders and, second, information on objective individual productivity. The study finds that individual research productivity was an important determinant of promotions and earnings. The results indicate that gender has no effect on the probability of being promoted, conditional on productivity, nor does it play a role in the performance evaluation of employees. Furthermore, the results suggest that contemporaneous productivity measures provide a usable proxy for the past productivity of a worker.
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Notes
In addition to these PhD-granting research universities, the Finnish higher education system includes polytechnics (also referred to as universities of applied sciences) that specialize in tertiary level vocational education.
For an extensive description of the pay system, see the “General collective agreement for universities” (downloadable at http://www.sivistystyonantajat.fi/tiedostopankki/158, viewed 20 February 2017).
At the time of the recruitment, each employee is assigned a supervisor, typically the head or deputy head of a department.
These variables are described in more detail in the Appendix.
The job complexity level in the previous period is entered as a linear term; using dummy variables instead did not change the main results.
See Wooldridge (2010, pp. 655–657) for a derivation of the ordered probit model from a latent variable model.
The marginal effects of the gender variable are reported in the upper panel of Table 12 in the Appendix.
The table reports the ordered probit coefficients. The marginal effects of the gender variable are reported in the lower panel of Table 12 in the Appendix.
Linear probability models for year-to-year increments of performance level provided qualitatively similar results.
The results of these estimations are available upon request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Ari Hyytinen, Petri Böckerman and participants at the EALE Conference (Turin), the seminar of Labour Institute for Economic Research (Helsinki) and the Annual Meeting of the Finnish Economic Association (Mariehamn) for helpful comments. Juho Jokinen and Jaakko Pehkonen acknowledge the financial support of the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation (grant numbers 6217 and 6085, respectively).
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Appendix
Appendix
Description of the variables.
Variable name | Description |
|---|---|
Monthly earnings | Monthly earnings in euros. |
Female | = 1 if female, = 0 if male. |
Age | Age in full years. Used as a proxy variable for potential total work experience. |
Tenure | Measures the number of years of service at the university. For employees missing this information, tenure measures the length of time since the latest labor contract was negotiated; the variable will therefore underestimate actual job tenure for some employees. Furthermore, in some cases, tenure is likely to be an overestimate of actual work experience because it is measured in full years after a specified reference date and possible career breaks are not accounted for. |
Education (highest degree) | Three options: master’s degree (or lower), licentiate’s degree, doctoral degree. Approximately 13% of the worker-year-observations lack information on education level. We imputed these missing values with the most common education level of the employees working in the same occupation. However, the reported results were essentially unchanged when individuals with missing education information were excluded from the analysis. |
Occupation | Occupations: 1) doctoral student, 2) teaching assistant, 3) researcher, 4) university instructor, 5) postdoctoral researcher, 6) senior researcher, 7) senior assistant, 8) lecturer, 9) professor, 10) other occupation. |
Job complexity level | 11 different job complexity levels. |
Number of publications | Publications are divided to three categories: 1) peer-reviewed international articles, 2) peer-reviewed national articles, 3) all other publications (e.g., book chapters, discussion papers). |
Departments | 27 departments. |
Administrative duties | = 1 if a worker had concurrent administrative duties (i.e., earned wage bonus for administrative duties), = 0 otherwise. |
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Jokinen, J., Pehkonen, J. Promotions and Earnings – Gender or Merit? Evidence from Longitudinal Personnel Data. J Labor Res 38, 306–334 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-017-9254-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-017-9254-7