Today’s Charts of the Day are from Olle Folke and Johanna Rickne’s paper “Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market”, and I share this paper in light of the #metoo discussion/drama on #EconTwitter over the last few days. (My reading notes on the paper are here).
The paper has three parts. In the first part, they share the prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace, using data from the Swedish Work Environment Survey. It is higher for women than men, though men face harassment too, and is highest for women in male-dominated workplaces. 25% of women at the most male-dominated workplaces experienced sexual harassment in the last year according to the survey. If the economics profession follows the patterns seen in this data, we would expect about 1 in 5 women to experience sexual harassment in a given year, since economics is about 2/3 male and 1/3 female. Although it’s over a longer period, this seems to be consistent with the numbers seen in the AEA Climate Survey (23% report experiencing sexual harassment over the last 10 years).
The second part of the paper is an analysis of an experiment where survey respondents were provided a series of vignettes on jobs that vary according to “the monthly wage, schedule flexibility, the tasks, and the work environment”, where the work environment includes potential sexual harassment. They use this to find the willingness to pay to (avoid) working at a job where they might face sexual harassment. Neither men nor women want to work in a place where they might face sexual harassment.
Thinking about what this looks like in real life: I am lucky enough to not be one of those 23% of women in economics who has faced sexual harassment (in the profession), yet my life was negatively impacted by sexual harassment in the profession, at least in the short-term. When I was on the job market, I went for a flyout at a government agency other than the one I currently work for. In one of my one-on-one meetings, one of the economists I met with warned me that one of her colleagues sexually harassed the female economists and no one in the leadership chain was doing anything about it.
I didn’t take that job, mostly due to the warning about the sexual harassment in the workplace. And my career as a professional economist had a much rougher start as a result, as I describe in this blog post from 2019. I took a much more risky job with a government contractor that had no contracts. I ended up doing some unusual freelance work that also didn’t turn out well. My long-term outcome is good, but I experienced large negative short-term consequences from avoiding the workplace with potential sexual harassment.
The final section of Folke and Rickne’s paper connects the survey responses to administrative jobs data to look at employment transitions. People leave jobs where they face sexual harassment. And those moves tend to increase the gender concentration in the workplace and the gender wage gap.
Taking a figure from my paper with Lucia Foster and Erika McEntarfer to zoom out from my own experience of the economics job market to think about the effect of harassment on the overall outcomes for women economists. We find a gender gap in the earnings of economists at initial job placement that grows over time, particularly in the upper rank. By 10 years post-PhD the median earnings of women graduating from top 20 programs is 79% of the earnings of men from the same programs.
We don’t know the reasons for the gap in earnings. But given the prevalence of sexual harassment reported in the AEA Climate Survey and on Twitter recently, some of it may come from women sorting into lower-paying work environments to avoid harassment. We find the overall gender gap, controlling for years of experience, is 12% but men and women sorting into different employers reduces that gap to 10%. There are many reasons to sort into a particular employer - geography, family, research support, etc. But I’m surely not the only person to have sorted into a sub-optimal job situation in order to avoid being harassed.
Our paper covers earnings by both sex and race. I’m sure people change jobs to avoid experiencing racism in the workplace as well. Once again, we don’t know why people choose particular employers, since employers are a bundle of characteristics. But one of those characteristics is the workplace environment and being free from harassment due to race will be an important aspect of that environment. We see even bigger employer sorting effects by race than by sex. Black economists have an overall gap in earnings relative to White economists of 15%, but that decreases to 6% when controlling for employer fixed effects.