Women’s access to supervisory jobs and gender inequality

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects on the gender wage gap of women’s access to supervisory jobs within each establishment in the Spanish labor market. Previous empirical studies have found that promoting women to supervisory positions has decreased the wage difference between genders among workers beneath them. However, these studies did not take into account the endogeneity problem associated with job choice. Design/methodology/approach - The author uses a switching model to control for this endogeneity problem under certain assumptions. Findings - Using matched employer–employee data from a sample of 213,709 workers in the Spanish labor market, the author found that an increase in the proportion of women among supervisors within each establishment significantly widens the wage difference between genders. This study shows that the impact of an increase in women’s power within establishments may well be more limited than other empirical studies suggest. Originality/value - The author will use the estimated correlations between unobservables to find out whether the most valued skills for being a supervisor and the skills that make a worker more productive in the workplace are substitutes or complements. Additionally, the author breaks down the effects of the gender composition of supervisory jobs on the wage gap into a direct and an indirect effect. The direct effect measures the impact of women’s representation among supervisors on the wage difference between men and women within the same job, whereas the indirect effect measures the impact of more women reaching supervisory posts on the wage gap induced by its impact on each type of gender segregation.