Abstract
This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79) and the Current Population Survey to estimate the wage effects of having a female supervisor. Existing studies, using OLS to estimate the supervisor gender effect, find wage penalties for both men and women associated with working for a female supervisor. We extend this research in two important ways. First, we control for gender segregation at job level as opposed to the broader occupation level. This is important because of the concern that supervisor gender is simply a proxy for the gender-type of the job. Second, we apply fixed effects estimation to control for selection effects of supervisor gender. When using OLS we find estimates of the supervisor gender effect similar to those in the existing literature. However, when using fixed effects we find no evidence of a supervisor gender effect for women and only a small, marginally significant effect for men. We conclude that existing OLS estimates overstate the importance of the impact of supervisor gender on wages.
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Notes
Cardoso and Winter-Ebmer (2010) is arguably an exception to this in that they find that women receive a wage premium when working in “female-led” firms. But, as discussed below, they do not present evidence on the relationship between wages and the gender of the direct supervisor of the worker.
In their model, “type” is interpreted broadly to mean gender, ethnicity, personality type, and so on. In this paper, we focus on gender types.
For those respondents who had no supervisory duties, co-worker proportion female \(=\) (number of women supervised by R’s supervisor)/(total number of workers under R’s supervisor). For those respondents who also supervised others, co-worker proportion female \(=\) (number of women supervised by R’s supervisor \(+\) number of women R supervised)/(total number of workers under R’s supervisor \(+\) total supervised by R).
This variable provides an indication of the degree of sex segregation within firms. About 72 % of women’s co-workers are women, while only about 22 % of men’s co-workers are women. For all workers with female supervisors, co-workers are 76 % women.
All analyses reported in this paper were also conducted using a sample that includes both workers with supervisors as well as those without supervisors. Our findings are unaffected by the inclusion of unsupervised workers.
Rothstein (1997) also considers the effect of supervisor gender on promotion when these respondents were much younger. She finds an insignificant relationship for both men and women. But she did not use a direct measure of turnover. Rather her outcome variable was the person’s “perceived likelihood” of promotion.
The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASAB) was administered in 1980, when NLSY79 subjects ranged in age from fifteen-23. The AFQT is derived sections of the ASVB. Our measure of AFQT is the standardized fitted value of AFQT from a regression of AFQT on a vector of age indicator variables.
We follow Rothstein by choosing the 60 % cut-off. Since this choice is arbitrary, in unreported regressions we also used the percent female in the three-digit occupation and industry. Conclusions are unaffected.
Reported point estimates use the transformation \(100\cdot (\text{ exp } ({\hat{\gamma }})-1)\).
We use a Stata program written by Cameron, Gelbach and Miller for implementing their method (http://personal.anderson.ucla.edu/judson.caskey/data.html).
Results from these specifications are available on request.
Hausman tests also indicate that FE is the preferred specification for these panel data.
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Sicilian, P., Grossberg, A.J. Does supervisor gender affect wages?. Empir Econ 46, 479–499 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-013-0695-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-013-0695-4