Skills, personality traits, and gender wage gaps: Evidence from Bangladesh

Arbeitspapier

We use a recent first-hand linked employer-employee survey covering the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive attainment and personality traits. Our results show that cognitive skills have greater explanatory power than personality traits in determining mean wages. Unconditional quantile regressions show that cognitive attainment as measured by reading and numeracy seems to confer different benefits on women and men respectively. The Big Five trait of agreeableness is positively associated with females' wages across the wage distribution. Decompositions show that about 30-40 per cent of the wage gap can be explained by characteristics along the wage distribution. Cognitive skills cumulatively account for a larger share of the explained component than personality traits do, and matter more at lower percentiles. However, together these cognitive and socio-emotional skills matter to a lesser degree than factors such as one's tenure in the firm.

Object Details

• ISBN: 978-92-9256-519-0
• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: WIDER Working Paper ; No. 2018/77

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials ; Labor Discrimination ; Single Equation Models; Single Variables: Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions ; Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
• Subject: Gender wage gap ; cognitive skills ; personality traits ; matched worker-firm data ; Bangladesh

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Nordman, Christophe J. ; Sarr, Leopold R. ; Sharma, Smriti
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)
• (where): Helsinki
• (when): 2018

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2018/519-0
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/190126
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET