I'm going to talk about women at work.

I'm gonna cover recent and historical trends, new perspectives in the discipline and also discuss policy options.

So women's involvement in the labor market has been one of the most important changes off the past century on this change has involved many aspect off the labor market.

So women have made very important in drugs in all dimensions of labor markets that has bean convergence in employment rates.

We respect to Ben convergence in earnings and also very important changes in the type of jobs on the commission that men and women do.

Despite this kind of very broad gender convergence, there are still important and persistent disparities between men and women in the labor market.

So to give you a very simple piece of data in the UK these days, women earn about 22% less than men and they're 12% points less likely to be in work in the U.

S.

The statistics are very similar to the UK, very big gender gaps and kind of smaller employment gaps in continental Europe.

The Petri sort of reversed the gender pay gap is smaller, but the gender employment gap is a lot larger.

So there are very big disparities in both prices on quantities between women and men in labor markets.

Which is kind of surprising because this is happening after decades off equalized education opportunities on equal pay legislation.

So this is a little bit the kind of framework in which I'm going to talk today.

The questions that I'm going to address today are sort off to be questions Festival The good news.

Why?

What are the factors?

The good side of it, what are the factors that East female entry into the labor market and, secondly, sort of the not so good news?

What are the factors that still hinder the full convergence between men and women in the workplace?

Now off course, as always, in economics and social sciences, we always need to ask, Why do we care?

Is it a problem?

Is it something that we should care about?

And then I'm going to give you a very simple answer to that is probably simplistic answer.

But yes, we do care about you.

We should care about it because men and women are equally productive.

If anything, girls these days invest more than boys in education.

They perform better in school, them boys.

And therefore, if the efficient allocation of workers to jobs requires that people are matched to the jobs that maximize the returns to their skills, there is really no point in selecting predominately from John one gender.

I suppose that from two genders, because they're strictly oneself to restrict from the male pool.

Toby.

Very simplistic about it, basically means that on average, the kind of people that we can select for a given job is of worst qualities, so that much quality would be worse.

So there is an issue of really efficient allocation off individuals, two jobs, really ensuring the men and women have equal assessed to labor markets.

Okay, a very simple answer to a huge question.

Yes, there is a problem if men and women's opportunities are not equalized.

As I said, this is a sort off, simple way to see that there's lots of caverns that are being discussed, even in research these days, to this kind of you.

First of all, educational attainment is equalized in terms of quantity, years of schooling, but certainly not in terms of quality So these days, girls on boys are still choosing different tracks and education on Does that happen?

Empathy, labor markets.

And secondly, if we're really serious about talking off economic efficiency, we should also take into account preferences, not only productivity.

And if we don't take into account preferences, we should really be asking ourselves to men and women have the same preferences or not.

So I'm going to be talking about a number off this aspect.

So the outline off the talk is first of all, starting from the facts.

I will talk about historical trends in education, labor, market on earnings.

Secondly, I will be talking about forces that works, explaining this trends and finally, the factors that underlie the remaining disparities in the labor market.

So the facts I will start from education.

I was saying before that these days there is no reason to believe that women are less productive than man, and this is probably the main reason behind that.

So this figure gives you the college graduation rates in the U.

S.

For, uh, by the age of 35 four people board between 18 70 in 1980.

So as you can see here at the very beginning of the sample period, late 19th century early 19 early 20th century, very few people were graduating among either men or women, so 5% graduation rate almost equal across genders.

Then, in the interwar period, educational attainment of both males and women started to increase extremely rapidly.

But as you can see, Mae's graduation rate very quickly surpassed, with females graduation right by a big chunk.

So between, say, 19 10th cohort on 1955 90 60 cohort man graduation rate were significantly higher than women's graduation rates.

Oh, man, we're investing in education a lot more than females.

But then, with the baby boom go horse, this gap actually reversed on in current cohorts female.

Her more likely to graduate from college in the US than that man.

And then they used to be before, of course, so there is absolutely no gender gap.

If anything, there is a reverse gender gap in favor for Mays in the rates of education.

This is about your city counters.

So this figure here is a snapshot off Corrine graduation rates among relatively young workers 25 to 34.

So this is for 2014 or most recent available data, and this is basically a cross section of a very large number of Voice City countries in these countries.

The sort of orange bars represent the graduation rate from college for men, and the blue diamonds represent the graduation rate for college for Sorry, they're Orange Line is for women on the Blue Diamonds is for men, as you can see everywhere except in a very small handful of countries like Switzerland.

Uh, China, Turkey Almost everywhere.

Women are more likely to graduate from college than men everywhere in the city.

Okay, now, this is really about the quantity off years of schooling, the probability to graduate from college If one looks so what women and men doing college.

Indeed, there are important disparities there.

So this picture here represents the fraction off female graduates and may graduates in heart sciences.

So here I am, talking about science, mathematics and computing.

So what is the distribution off men and women in the total number of graduates in this disciplines?

Why am I looking at this disciplines?

Because these are really the disciplines that tend to be associate ID with higher earnings in the labor market.

Okay, so that's processing that That That's the only reason why I'm looking for the moment that this discipline here.

So as you can see here, except again in a very small group off no representative countries here everywhere in the U.

S.

City women are much less likely than men to graduate from Stan subjects from hiring sort of majors.

Okay, so this is the sort off educational snapshots.

Let's move on to the labor market.

I'm gonna give you some data on the employment rate of women, which is basically the proportion of employed women over the total working age population in the U.

S.

And in a number of ways, city counter.

So let's start from the U.

S.

Here.

These sample starts at the beginning of the 20 century between the beginning of the century.

On the start of World War two, the employment rate of women is extremely low between 20 and 25% on also relatively stable, relatively stagnant with war war two after World War two, there's been a huge ramp up on this huge acceleration of female employment from 25% to nearly 70% in the 19 nineties, and then he has completely plateau or even slightly reversed after that.

But in ST in, say, 50 years between 1940 1990 female employment went from 25% to about 70%.

So huge increase.

These are six big European countries, so it's France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

The red line here represents again the end the World War two.

As you can see after the end of World War Two, this country's look like each other a lot.

There's bean, an increasing training female participation in all these countries.

The levers were somewhat different, and in particular.

For example, if you compare, for example, Spain and the U.

K, you can see that the trend is a lot steeper than staying that in the UK, because in Spain, the sort off beginning level of female employment after World War two was a little lower than in the UK, So there's also been some sort of cross counter convergence in female employment rate, but very clear.

I'm positive trends after World War Two, this is Scandinavia, even more the transit some Scandinavian countries have been extremely steep, like, for example, Norway and Sweden on the levers are also very different from the rest of Europe.

So, for example, if you compare Sweden and Norway to southern European countries, you see that these days women have unemployment rate in Sweden and Norway of about 80% while it's only 50 to 60% for example, in Italy and Spain.

Another very important takeaway point from those graphs is that this sustained increase in female employment rates that we have observed since World War Two is not really a sort of historical necessity before World War Two.

And this is the reason why I put a sort of red line divide.

Before that, the experience in this country's was relatively different.

So in many countries, female employment friends were kind of flat or even decreasing.

For example, like in the Netherlands, in Italy, in the UK and in some Scandinavian countries, too, this is the so called U shape pattern in female participation.

So if you really look at countries at very different stages in their development process, it's not always true that the association between development and female participation is Moloch tonic, in particular in societies in pre industrial societies, in which a big chunk of the labor force is employed in agriculture.

In this particular societies, women are actually working a lot.

They're working as much as men, and it's only when a certain economist has to industrialize.

Is the work moves from the household and from the field into factories that we must start to stay at home.

So the U shaped sort off picture, which you can see very clearly.

For example, in the Netherlands, here in France, in the UK, in Italy, the declining part off this kind of U shaped pattern corresponds to the decline of the agricultural sector on the expansion of the manufacturing sector and then the Rampak off.

Female participation corresponds instead of situation in which the manufacturing sector is shrinking on the service sector is expanded.

So this kind off traditional may breadwinner model and female housewife is a creation that is relatively modern, is something that is typical to industrialize in societies.

Okay, so these are the main takeaway points from this kind of historical trends.

I'm gonna talk about earnings a little bit.

Not as much as as I've been talking about employment, because on earnings there's much less state, especially not internationally comparable data and not very long historical trends.

But we can make a very similar consideration as we've made from female employment here.

So this to grass represents the relative female earnings, a set percentage of male earning.

So this is UK and US both in the UK and the US That has a very clear upward trend in female earnings.

So in the UK, the media woman was earning about 50% off the median man in 1970 on these days is about 83% similar in the U.

S.

So very strong convergence in earnings.

If you look at European countries here of sample France, Germany and Italy, there's been somewhat of a sort of increasing trend.

But there's two things that one need to notice.

First of all, the convergence is less pronounced than in Anglo Saxon countries, and also the level is a lot higher.

So in terms off relative earnings, women are doing a lot better.

In France, for example, 85% in Italy 85 to 90% and even in Germany than in the U.

S.

And in the UK, this is due to two main reasons one obvious reason is that these countries in continental Europe have a much more compressed wish distribution.

They're much more sort off.

They have more equal weight setting policies and a much more sort of concentrated wish distribution, which means that if you take a very brought a very wide and weight distribution, any given differences in the characteristics of working men and women becomes amplified in a country that has very big, for example, returns to educational returns to experience.

Why, where the register vision is very compressed, there is a much to sort off amplify differences in characteristics.

But there is another very important force going on here.

The fact that these figures here are coming from individuals worry work on.

There is a very strong selection effect, or women who are actually work.

So in these countries Italy, France and Germany, the employment rate a woman is markedly lower than the employment rate in Anglo Saxon countries.

So if working women tend to be over sample from the high part from the high wage section off the photo distribution, then it's no wonder why this country's the female wage gap is not that large simply because law, which women are less likely to feature in the observers distribution.

So it's really important to consider in conjunction gaps in employment and gaps in wages because, of course, selection effects in play, this kind of negative correlation between wage gaps, unemployment gaps.

Now there will be a lot to say about the type of jobs that men and women do.

But instead of sort of going at length for the second time, I'm giving you this one particular picture.

And this is probably the case in which a picture speaks 1000 words.

This is a picture that refers to young graduates in the in the U.

S.

Between 1940 on the core in days.

So these two lines here represent the proportion off female college graduates that work in sort off.

Typically females occupation, teaching, nursing librarian, social workers or, typically, male occupation, sort of professionals of managerial jobs.

So in 1940 about 70% off female graduates were becoming teaching nurses, librarians and social workers, and only like 13% were becoming doctors and lawyers and so forth.

These days, if you look at current graduates, there's actually more female graduates going into managerial and professional occupation than in traditional female occupations.

So the nature, the type of jobs on the sort of financial status of jobs at Burnham men and women are doing it.

The liberal market has incredibly converge in the past 50 years or so.

Okay, So having very briefly observed these trends, what can we say about the underlying economic and social forces that brought this this trans together again?

Here, the literature is huge.

I'm gonna touch upon a few things that I think that more interesting and more active.

You research these days.

So of course, I've already talked about human capital investment.

Women are investing in education as much as men these days.

But it wasn't definitely the case, say, 50 or 60 years ago.

And then there's been technological progress in all sorts of areas, off work and personal life.

For example, there's been important medical progress that has implied that, for example, there is birth control these days.