Women's Employment - United Nations Research Institute for Social ...

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Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco reveals that, in actual labour markets, there are considerable and persistent wage differentials between social groups (men and women, but also e.g. ethnic, caste and race groups) which are not easily explained by orthodox theory (Birdsall and Sabot, 1991). Attempts to explain labour market discrimination within the neoclassical framework have looked at both demand and supply side issues. Demand side explanations have focused on employer prejudice (e.g. Becker, 1957, cited in Birdsall and Sabot, 1991:2) and statistical discrimination due to imperfect information (Phelps, 1972 cited in Birdsall and Sabot, 1991.). In the former explanation, employers have a preference for hiring people from their own, or particular social groups, and thus are prepared to pay a premium on wages to hire workers from the preferred group. In the latter, a “transactions costs” approach is used to explain why women are paid less than men and/or discriminated against in recruitment. In this case, gender is seen as a supplier of information, where the time and money involved in assessing the capacities of employees is limited. Employers use gender as a screening device, on the basis that (observing existing gender divisions and educational level) women are, on average, deemed likely to be less productive than men. While the impact of this is discriminatory, since all women are assumed to have the characteristics of the average, presumed inferior, woman, it is held to be not intentional discrimination. Employers lack information about the actual productivity of individual workers and this information is too costly to acquire on a case by case basis. So, employment decisions are made on the basis of information or assumptions about the average characteristics of a particular social group. Ultimately, however, it is unclear whether there is a real difference between these two explanations; assumptions about particular social groups may themselves be founded in prejudice. Other approaches to explaining women’s lower wages rest on supply side issues, i.e. their weaker attachment to the labour force, due to childbearing and rearing responsibilities. This also ties in with institutional approaches to labour market analysis where technology is seen as key to the development of primary and secondary labour forces, and labour force segmentation. Since women are more weakly attached to the labour force, they tend to be confined to lower wage jobs in the secondary labour force. It also links in with Becker’s theory of household specialization and comparative advantage. Becker’s approach (1981, cited in Schultz, 1991:16) suggests that women may choose to specialize in domestic work, rather than wage earning work, 46
Wage discrimination by gender in Morocco’s urban labour force because they are more efficient in this sector, as a result of pre-existing gender divisions of labour. Furthermore, because women are less efficient in commercial activities (since they have not specialized in these or made human capital investments), they command lower wages in the labour market. This differs from previous theories in that it does attempt to explain women’s lower wages, not by intrinsic biological differences, but rather by a theory of gender division of labour according to comparative advantage. Nevertheless, it rests on the idea that women’s productivity is lower and that the market itself is non-discriminatory. Here, it is argued that a supply-based, behavioural model is not a wholly satisfactory explanation in the sense that women do not freely choose to underinvest in training. There is an interplay between supply and demand factors, whereby, for example, a woman with limited prospects (because of statistical discrimination) invests less in training and therefore loses comparative advantage. Estimation of a production function for 1992-93 shows that the elasticity of value added with respect to the participation rate of female workers (permanent or temporary) is lower than that for male workers in both categories. This, it is hypothesized here, gives some evidence that, in line with neoclassical theory, the productivity of the female labour force is lower. VII. Analysis of wage discrimination in Morocco 1. Methodology Exploratory econometric analysis was undertaken to establish the relative contribution of supply and demand related factors to women’s observed lower wages in Morocco, using 1993 data from the national urban employment survey (ENPAU), which covers urban wage earners in both formal and informal sectors. Following Arrow (1973) and Becker (1975), separate wage functions are estimated for men and women (in logarithmic form), where wages are regressed on vectors of quantitative and qualitative explanatory variables in each case. A further regression used as the dependent variable the difference between women’s actual wages and the wages they would receive (hypothetically) if their characteristics had been utilized to the full, in the absence of gender discrimination, i.e. as if they were men. This is calculated by substituting the coefficients on the quantitative and qualitative vectors of variables 47
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Women’s Employment in the Textile
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This United Nations Research Instit
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Acknowledgements Many people have b
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Page 15 and 16: Introduction 1 Introduction 1 Shahr
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Becoming a garment worker 5Becoming
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Becoming a garment worker Endnotes
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Becoming a garment worker Cole P. D
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Women’s employment in the textile
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