In September 2018, the French government implemented a suite of measures to reduce wage gaps between women and men. Among these measures, a requirement on all private companies with more than 50 employees to calculate their professional equality index. They must attain a minimum threshold on this index, or face sanctions. We analyse the efficacy of this index in highlighting pay inequality between women and men. After first explaining the rules for calculating the index, we analyse the results for companies in 2020 and compare them with male-female pay inequalities measured using other indicators. We observe that the pay gap indicator as measured by the index tends to minimise the true level of inequality, resulting from the exclusion of certain employees, from the option for companies to declare the index to be incalculable, and the methodologies chosen.
<div><p>Role model interventions are often designed to foster students’ pursuit of specific careers and are commonly employed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).</p><p>Here, we drew on social-psychological theories of intergroup relations to hypothesize that role model interventions might also unintentionally shape students’ beliefs and preferences concerning the broader social system-their ideologies. Specifically, role model interventions may lead students to view the (inequitable) status quo in STEM as natural and acceptable. A systematic narrative review (35 articles, 42 studies) examined these hypothesized side effects. This review indicated that the ideological side effects of role model interventions were rarely considered in the literature on role models. Although limited, the few relevant findings revealed both undesirable side effects of role model interventions on students’ ideologies (e.g., greater endorsement of the status quo) and effects that are-from our perspectivedesirable (e.g., greater awareness of gender bias in STEM). This review demonstrates that role models can be a double-edged sword and serves as a call to evaluate role model interventions based on criteria beyond motivation.</p></div>
Using rich historical surveys on job tasks and advanced machine learning techniques, we study which jobs can be moved from the office to home over three decades in France.<p>The share of jobs that can be done from home has increased steadily from 14% in 1991 to 45% in 2021. At the same time, actual Working From Home (WFH) remained limited to less than one fifth of its full potential before the Covid-19 crisis and is still below it in 2021.</p><p>The growth of WFH is largely unrelated to the evolution of job tasks, implying that the main obstacles to WFH have not been technical constraints. Low-skilled employees in particular have jobs that have long been largely teleworkable but they were barely teleworking before the Covid-19 crisis and remained still below 50% of their full potential during it. This pattern is not explained by differences in workers’ desire to telework. It implies that the well-known large inequality in access to WFH along the earnings distribution cannot be attributed only to feasibility constraints and is potentially inefficient.</p>
While there is no gap in math performance at the beginning of Grade 1, a gap in favor of boys appears and widens during the first year of primary school. Using standardized national assessments administered during Grade 1 (CP) to more than 2.5 million pupils in France between 2018 and 2022, we show that this relative drop in girls’ performance is observed for all the cohorts and most of the exercises assessed. The greatest drop-off occurs among the best-performing girls at the start of Grade 1 (those in the top 1 % initially). These girls lose an average of nearly 7 percentile ranks at the start of second grade compared with boys in the same initial percentile. The emergence of a gender gap in math performance during Grade 1 is observed across all social categories and family compositions, and throughout the country. Girls lose slightly less ground compared to boys in classes where the top student in math is a girl, and in priority networks public schools (REP or REP+). However, characteristics of the school environment explain only a small part of the overall dynamics, suggesting that girls are losing ground compared to boys in every strata of society.
We study the earnings responses to six large payroll tax and income tax reforms in France. We find evidence of full pass-through to workers in cases where there is a strong and clear relationship between contributions and expected benefits. By contrast, we find a limited pass-through of employer payroll taxes to workers for reforms with no tax-benefit linkage, and close to full pass-through to workers for income tax reforms nominally incident on employees. Together with a meta-analysis of the literature, we interpret these results as evidence that tax-benefit linkage matters for incidence of payroll taxes, a claim long made by the literature but not backed by empirical evidence to date. Absent tax-benefit linkage, our results suggest that the individual-level incidence of payroll taxes aligns with their statutory incidence.
Vishkin (2022) shows that female participation in chess is lower in more gender equal countries (the “gender-equality paradox”) but that this relation is driven by the mean age of the players in a country, which makes it more of an epiphenomenon than a real paradox. Relying on the same data on competitive chess players ( N = 768,480 from 91 countries) as well as on data on 15-year-old students ( N = 312,571 from 64 countries), we show that the gender-equality paradox for chess holds among young players. The paradox also remains on the whole population of chess players when controlling for the age of the players at the individual rather than at the country level or when controlling for age differences across countries. Therefore, there is a gender-equality paradox in chess that is not entirely driven by a generational shift mechanism as argued by Vishkin (2022), and previous explanations for the paradox cannot be dismissed.
Even though females currently outnumber males in higher education, they remain largely underrepresented in math-related fields of study, with no sign of improvement during the past decades. To better understand which students drive this underrepresentation, we use PISA 2012 data on 251,120 15-year-old students in 61 countries to analyse boys’ and girls’ educational intentions along the ability distribution on math assessment tests. We analyze the percentages of boys and girls intending to pursue math-related studies or careers as a function of math performance. First, we show that for both boys and girls, there is a positive and linear relation between the probability of intending to pursue math and math performance. Second, the positive relation is stronger among boys than among girls. In particular, the gender gap in student intentions to pursue math-related studies or careers is close to zero among the poorest performers in math and increases steadily with math performance. Third, as a consequence, the gender gap in math performance, to the detriment of girls, is larger among students intending to pursue math than in the general student population.
We show in a large-scale field experiment that a brief exposure to female role models working in scientific fields affects high school students’ perceptions and choices of undergraduate major. The classroom interventions reduced the prevalence of stereotypical views on jobs in science and gender differences in abilities. They also made high-achieving girls in grade 12 more likely to enrol in selective and male-dominated science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs in college. Comparing treatment effects across the 56 role model participants, we find that the most effective interventions are those that improved students’ perceptions of science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers without overemphasising women’s under-representation in science.
