Abstract

"Recent research shows that firms and jobs are more important for understanding gender wage inequalities than individual-level and occupational-level attributes. I investigate how two mechanisms derived from relational inequality theory, opportunity hoarding and exploitation, affect within-firm gender wage gaps. First, men might exclude women from high-paying firms or jobs (i.e. opportunity hoarding), resulting in gender wage inequalities. Second, male managers might use their relational power to redistribute wages from females to males (exploitation). Increasing the number of female managers might stop this exploitation. While previous literature focused on the effect of female managers on the gender wage gap, I contribute to the literature by also considering the impact of female managers on males’ wages theoretically and empirically. Using German linked employer-employee data and fixed-effect regressions at the firm and job levels, I find evidence for opportunity hoarding at both the firm and the job levels. For the exploitation mechanism, female managers increase females’ wages and lower males’ wages, suggesting the existence of the exploitation mechanism. Further analyses show that the increases in females’ wages are proportional to the decreases in males’ wages. Thus, I find evidence for female managers redistributing males’ wages to females." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © Taylor & Francis) ((en))