Female Leadership and Gender Gap within Firms
FBK-IRVAPP is pleased to invite you to the following seminar:
“Female Leadership and Gender Gap within Firms”
With the participation of: Agata Maida
Language The seminar is held in English.
Abstract: Over the last decade, many countries have followed the Norwegian example and introduced laws mandating gender quota for corporate board membership. The main aim of these laws is breaking the “glass ceiling” which prevents women from advancing into top parts of the earnings distribution. In this paper, we evaluate the Italian law of 2011, which installed a step-wise increase in gender quota that are in place for three consecutive board renewals of listed limited liability forms. We link firm-level information on board membership and board renewal dates with detailed employment and earnings records from the Social Security registers. Exploiting the staggered introduction of the gender quota and variation in board renewals across firms, we evaluate the effect of the board gender composition on measures of gender gaps in the workforce over a period of 4 years. While the reform substantially raised the female membership on corporate boards, we find only very small and non-robust effects on female employment, the share of females in higher parts of the firm wage distribution, or the share of female part-time workers. Our results thus resemble the findings of Bertrand et al. (2018) who study the introduction of a gender quota for board members in Norway. Given that Italy is a much more unequal society than Norway, with a larger scope of establishing gender equality, our results confirm that board quota are an ineffective policy at least in the short run. It remains to be seen if the temporary nature of these policies will make any change in the career prospects of women.
Speakers
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Agata Maida - Guest SpeakerAgata Maida is Assistant Professor in Economic Policy within the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at the University of Milan (IT) and senior research fellow at LABORatorio Revelli, Collegio Carlo Alberto and INPS ( National Institute of Social Security) . She has an established research record in the area of labor economics. Her research interests include education and skill mismatch, labor market and institution, gender economics. She was previously senior researcher at RWI (Reinisch-Westfaelisches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung), Essen, and visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California at Berkeley. Her articles have appeared, among the others, in The Review of Economic Studies, The Economic Journal, and Economics Letters. She contributed to several research projects, both at national and international level, and enjoyed research periods abroad in various internationally recognised research centres (e.g. RWI, Essen; UC, Berkeley). Agata holds a doctoral degree from the University of Torino.