Time
19 Feb 2020 / 09:00
to
10:00
Event
SARS Brooklyn Bridge, Linton House Auditorium (2nd floor), 570 Fehrsen Street, Nieuw Muckleneuk (Brooklyn), Pretoria, South Africa
Inequality
Research seminar
SA-TIED seminar on the gender wage gap in South Africa's manufacturing sector
SA-TIED will hold a seminar on the gender wage gap in South Africa's manufacturing sector. The seminar will be given by Victor Stolzenburg under the work stream on Turning the tide on inequality.
The seminar will take place at the South African Revenue Service in Pretoria, South Africa, and is open to the public.
The seminar is based on the SA-TIED working paper, Gender wage gap: An analysis of the South African manufacturing sector, by Caro Janse Van Rensburg, Marianne Matthee, and Victor Stolzenburg.
Abstract - Gender wage gap: An analysis of the South African manufacturing sector
Inequality has been on the rise in most countries over the past decades. This has negative consequences for social cohesion and economic growth. An important aspect of inequality are differences in economic opportunities by gender. Substantial gender wage gaps (GWGs) contribute significantly to overall wage inequality. In this paper, we look at a driver of gender inequality that is often overlooked: international trade.
Trading firms make up 70% of employment in South African manufacturing and, hence, have a large impact on the labour dynamics in South Africa. Using employer-employee matched data on the universe of formal South African manufacturing firms, we show that these firms exhibit a higher GWG than non-traders and, thus, increase South Africa's GWG. We then shed light on the channels behind this relationship.
The effect seems to be driven by trading firms requiring more flexibility from their workforce due to the necessary interactions with customers and suppliers across different continents and time zones. As women are or, at least, considered to be less flexible in light of uneven household responsibilities, they receive a lower trading wage premium than men. We find no evidence for other potential channels, namely foreign ownership or profitability.