Female vs Male Behavior in the Labor Market
Page Overview | Income and Substitution Effects | Female vs Male Behavior in the Labor Market | Opportunity Cost of Leisure Time | Works Used
Female vs Male Behavior in the Labor Market
Gender and economics are not immutable naturally occurring phenomena but rather are socially constructed, according to one of the prominent feminist economists today, Marianne Ferber.
The following discussion may not be applauded by the majority of the class, having in mind its male predominance. But the authors believe that women's different behavior in the labor market deserves a little bit of attention, after listening throughout our undergradute career about the behavior of "economic man".
The vast majority of the empirical literature in labor economics talks exclusively about the economic man. (Blank, 166) What is even worse, is that this is usually not made clear in the title or in the discussion itself. These research oversimplify their results by excluding women from the sample. We believe that this is wrong not only because of the strong femisnist convictions that our group witholds but also because not including women actually leads to substatntial statistical deviations. This is especially true in developed countries such as the USA where the number of full-time female workers has been steadily increasing,and represents today a big share of the national working force. The excuse of researchers who ignore the different behavior of women in the labor market, such as the fact that the data is not tractable, is unacceptable. We are going to present the conclusions of some feminist economists who chose to analyze the often incomplete data rather than taking males as representatives of everyone. As Rebecca Blank says in her economic work, man and person are not synonymous, and economic man does not explain labor behavior nationwide. Also, she is making the distinction between “paid work” and “unpaid activities”, which are not leisure. Unpaid activities refer to the work a woman has to do in her household, which was traditionally done by women.
Interestingly enough, some economists even refer to children as work, or leisure. Shelly Lunberg refers to them as an important jointly-consumed commoditiy for husbands and wives.
But traditions are not what they used to be. In the last two decades, women have steadily been moving towards economic independency. They have become more educated, and their share of the national labor force has also increased. This is mainly reflected not in decisions to work more but in the wage elasticity of the labor supply curve, which namely reflects the degree women react to changes in the labor market.
Elasticity, Income and Subsitution Effect for the Labor Supply Curves: Men vs Women
