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Bachelor thesis

Discrimination in the hiring process : could equal parental leave help to close the gender pay gap in Geneva ?

  • Genève : Haute école de gestion de Genève

110 p.

Bachelor of Science HES in International Business Management: Haute école de gestion de Genève, 2022

English Disparities in pay scales between men and women whether the explainable or unexplained gap have been studied over the years. Empirical research found the drivers of these disparities are correlated with women working in low-paid industries, engagement in part-time work, and more importantly motherhood penalties causing a decline in wages for women. The latter is enhanced by the expectation of women pausing their careers for longer periods than men do. The sources arise from the different families’ schemes and so-called: parental “policies”. Across the global divergence in parental leave and unequal settlements of the time off work to look after children vary significantly. This is especially true in Switzerland, where women are provided with 16 weeks of maternal leave and 2 weeks for fathers.
Uneven parental leave policy contributes to enlarging pay gap, employment opportunities, and unfairness of child duty distribution among the partners. This thesis aims to measure the impact on wage distribution between women and men if an equal parental cantonal policy is implemented in the Geneva (Switzerland).
To accomplish a survey-based experiment was created, managers were exposed to a CV of a female or male candidate. Both resumes had identical experience, skills, and competences. The executives of each firm department were asked to attribute salaries they would be willing to provide to candidates if they were to hire them. The public and private industry, as well as 4 departments across each company, were analysed. To allow comparison even number of companies, institutions and divisions were examined among 32 respondents. To test the effects of the probable difference in wages distribution between the gender 16 participants received a factual modification of the law (equal parental leave) along with the CV’s and 16 others obtained the same CVs but with the actual parental policy enacted in Geneva (unequal parental leave). Thus, half of the CVs were female gender with a picture and feminine name, and the other half were a masculine name and a picture of a male. This equivalent distribution was essential to permit an effective comparison.
When considering different contexts and possible scenarios to analyse our data, no evidence of statistically significant differences was found when using the hypothesis of equal paternity leave for measuring any effect on the salary distribution between men and women. Evidence of statistically significant differences in wages was found in the scenario when including the several departments of the study. However, thesedifferences were not enough to discover any changes in the distribution of wages under the hypothesis of equal paternity leave.
The principal limitation of the study was the scope where the number of respondents was insufficient. The study only encompasses the Geneva canton and not the overall panel of Switzerland. However, the study confirms the discriminatory aspects and highlights persistence of stereotypes by the frequent skills attributed to each gender.
Therefore, no definite conclusion could be drawn at the moment on the effect if they choose to apply the modified paternity leave law to change the wage distribution in the variable gender. Moreover, the variable gender did not display any significant difference in the variable wage. In each subgroup, the number of observations was greatly low (2) which did not allow to perform a more accurate analysis when applying the interaction among the variables. The next steps of the study would need to pass by increasing the survey collection to test for robustness further.
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
Notes
  • Haute école de gestion de Genève
  • International Business Management
  • hesso:hegge
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/hesso/documents/321989
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