Management competencies of women business owners

Women owners of small business are known to be better informed about issues relating to starting their own business compared to their male counterparts. Women spend more time conducting market research and have historically spent more time accessing finance because of gender bias within the lending industry. Due to their previous employment history many women have better administrative skills over men which should translate to women having better basic business management knowledge and a higher level of basic business competencies. Research conducted on a sample of 270 business owners found that whereas women rated themselves as more competent than men on a number of issues when they first started their business, they were no more inclined than men to pursue further business skills development or training once they were actively operating their business. Further, both women and men believed that they gained sufficient managerial experience ‘on-the-job’ not to warrant professional assistance in most business competencies.     

How should Mass attendance be measured? An Italian case study

The validity of measures of Mass attendance has been a matter of controversy for some time in Italy, just as it has in other countries. This study will show that the different survey methods which can be used each have distinct advantages and disadvantages. We will compare the questionnaire and daily diary as measuring devices and try to highlight their main qualities and failings. More specifically, although the large number of up-to-date questionnaire-based surveys carry the benefit of offering a ??richer?? range of information regarding the interviewee??s religious behaviour, they provide data which is excessively approximate on a systematic basis. In comparison, time use studies are less common and much more costly, partly because they usually use a daily diary to record the activities carried out. Although the data they produce is ??scarcer?? in terms of information, it is also much more reliable. Indeed, estimates obtained from comparisons between the two tools highlight significant differences. In addition, synchronic and diachronic comparisons cannot be carried out due to the fact that the distortions introduced by the use of questionnaires are extremely variable over time and depending on the social segments studied (young people/adults, men/women etc.). The conclusion we will draw is that the daily diary is a far more suitable tool for surveying Mass attendance than the questionnaire because of these distortions. Finally, we will show that this conclusion does not depend on the specific survey methods adopted, as comparisons with multination surveys seem to confirm that, at least with regard to Italy, distortion resulting from use of a questionnaire is a general phenomenon.     

Can Lawyers Take Parental Leaves and If So, with What Impacts? The Case of Québec

Lawyers are increasingly females, with women having gained a major entry in this profession and outnumbering males in legal studies and new rights have been put forward in some countries, such as parental leaves. Thus, the modalities by which lawyers use, or forgo, these new rights, in particular concerning parental leaves that can be shared between parents, raise questions in a profession characterized by significant time demands. Does this go so far as to challenge the traditional model of gender relations in the profession? Our analysis of the uptake of parental leaves indicates this is not the case and that firms do not support women and parentality more than was the case when only men dominated the profession. Surprisingly, things do not appear to have changed much over 20 years, as women are still not in the position to put in additional hours, to take on additional cases or responsibilities or to participate in social in evening activities. And still today, women affirm that their incomes are lower and that they get promoted less often than men. It appears that, although it is a right to take maternity and parental leave, those who do take these leaves have less career opportunities, for example less chances to make partner in a firm than those who choose not to take these leaves. While women tend to move to smaller firms with less constraints concerning work hours, male lawyers, contrarily to men in many other professions who take the paternity/parental leave at a rate of 80 % when they become fathers, feel this may be a high price to pay and those in large law firms tend not to take this leave or to reduce its duration.     

Work absences and doctor visits during an illness episode: The differential role of preferences,production, and policies among men and women

This paper analyzes the absenteeism and medical care consumption behavior of employed men and women during an episode of acute illness. An individual’s daily optimization decisions are modeled in a dynamic framework to evaluate the role of (1) preferences for absences and treatment, (2) effectiveness of these inputs on recovery, and (3) economic incentives in determining the number and timing of absences and doctor visits and the duration of illness. In general, men appear to be more responsive than women to changes in sick leave and health insurance mainly due to differences in preferences.     

Justice in the workplace: the centrality of social versus judgmental predictors of performance varies by gender

Men and women are said to perceive justice differently, with women proposed to be more concerned with relational issues and men focused more on material issues. In this study, the potential for differential effects of justice on performance by gender was analyzed across the four contemporary types of justice. Respondents were 265 male and 113 female occupationally diverse employees in a single organization. The results show significant differences in how men and women respond to the four justice types with only one – informational justice – acting similarly by gender. The differential relationships between each of the justice types and the outcomes by gender highlight the utility of the four factor approach to measuring organizational justice. Women were more interested in maintaining social harmony than men. The results appear to strongly support the use of the justice judgment model over the group-value model as a means of explaining the gender differences. Implications for management include the importance of informational justice both generally and within the performance appraisal process.     

Left behind to farm? Women's labor re-allocation in rural China

The transformation of work during China's rapid economic development is associated with a substantial but little noticed re-allocation of traditional farm labor among women, with some doing much less and some much more. We study how the health, work and time allocation of non-migrant women are affected by the migration of others in their household. We find little impact on their health outcomes but do find that the women left behind are doing more farm work than would have otherwise been the case. We show that this may be a persistent effect, and not just temporary re-allocation. In stark contrast, no such impacts are found for left-behind men.     

Russian workers’ experiences with and perceptions of sexual harassment severity

As the reach of global business operations increases, cultural context will likely influence the nature and amount of sexual harassment workers experience. Surprisingly, little is known about sexual harassment in Russia, an attractive target for expanding companies. To address this gap in the literature, we examine Russian workers’ perceptions of sexual harassment severity through the lens of cultural context. In particular, we examine the sexual harassment severity perceptions from the perspective of both targets and perpetrators. Results indicate that as targets of sexual harassment, Russian women and men held similar sexual harassment severity perceptions. However, as perpetrators, Russian women reported perceiving the harassment they committed as being less severe than the reports of Russian men. Further, among both targets and perpetrators, Russian women held less permissive sexual attitudes than Russian men, with this difference mediating the relationship between participant sex and perceived sexual harassment severity: women perceived greater severity than men because women hold less permissive sexual attitudes. Implications for research, practice, and the role of national culture in shaping the social construction of sexual harassment are discussed.     

Potential Unemployment Benefit Duration and Spell Length: Lessons from a Quasi-Experiment in Austria

The paper studies the effect of potential unemployment benefit duration on the length of unemployment spells in Austria. It takes advantage of a quasi-experimental situation, where potential benefit duration was extended in 1988 for elderly workers living in specific regions of the country. The empirical analysis shows that men react significantly to benefit duration whereas women generally do not. The quantitative impact is smaller than in comparable studies for the US and Germany. Furthermore, the impact of extended benefit duration is differentiated for short and long spells. Whereas for long spells higher impacts for men as well as for women are found, no unemployment-prolonging effects for short spells could be detected.     

Informal adult care and caregivers' employment in Europe

I discuss instrumental variable estimates of the effect of providing unpaid adult care on the caregivers' probability of being employed, using eight waves of the European Community Household Panel. I focus on men aged 40–64 and women aged 40–59 from thirteen Member States, aggregated in two groups of Northern-Central and Southern countries. Previous papers with European data found that IV estimates are more negative than estimates assuming exogeneity of caregiving. I show that this difference is not robust once account is taken of time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Indeed, instruments turn out not to be needed, and the estimated effect is negative, but small in both groups of countries.     

DETAILED ESTIMATION OF WORKLIFE EXPECTANCY FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF HUMAN CAPITAL: ACCOUNTING FOR MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN

Abstract Measuring an individual's human capital at a point in time as the present actuarial value of expected net lifetime earnings has a lengthy history. Calculating such measures requires accurate estimates of worklife expectancy. Here, worklife estimates for men and women in the USA categorized by educational attainment, race, marital status, parental status and current labour force status are presented. Race has a much larger impact on the worklife expectancy of men than women. Education is associated with larger worklife differentials for women. The association between marriage and worklife expectancy is significant, but of opposite sign, for men and women: married women (men) have a lower (higher) worklife expectancy than single women (men). Parenthood is associated with a reduction in the worklife expectancy of women; the association is smaller and varies from positive for some education/marital status groups to negative for others for men.     

Municipal middle managers: psychosocial work environment in a gender-based division of labor

The purpose of the reported study was to explore how 245 municipal middle managers perceived their psychosocial and physical work environments, and to examine psychosomatic reactions and job satisfaction in departments engaged in different types of activity, also to compare male and female managers in these respects. The way in which psychosomatic reactions and job satisfaction were related to the psychosocial and physical work environments was also investigated. The results indicated a difference between departments depending on the type of activity. Departments concerned with care and education, i.e. care of the elderly, child care and schools showed a tendency to lower values for psychosocial work environment factors and more psychosomatic reactions than the departments geared more towards maintenance and production, i.e. street maintenance, the power plant department and the recreation office. In the departments concerned with children female managers were in a majority. In the street maintenance department, the recreation office and the power plant department, male managers predominated. Compared to the men, the women had a higher level of education, lower salaries, more reactions of a psychosomatic nature, lower job satisfaction and a less satisfying psychosocial work environment. The only department with an equal number of male and female managers was the schools department. Here there were no differences between men and women in the factors studied. Two partial correlations were computed in order to separate the importance of type of activity and sex to the work environment factors and outcome variables. This indicated that the type of activity was more important than biological sex. The gendering of work activities is therefore also discussed and further investigations are suggested.     

Job satisfaction and gender: Why are women so happy at work?

By most objective standards, women's jobs are worse than men's, yet women report higher levels of job satisfaction than do men. This paper uses a recent large-scale British survey to document the extent of this gender differential for eight measures of job satisfaction and to evaluate the proposition that identical men and women in identical jobs should be equally satisfied. Neither the different jobs that men and women do, their different work values, nor sample selection account for the gender satisfaction differential. The paper's proposed explanation appeals to the notion of relative well-being, especially relative to workers' expectations. An identical man and woman with the same jobs and expectations would indeed report identical job satisfaction, but women's expectations are argued to be lower than men's. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that the gender satisfaction differential disappears for the young, the higher-educated, professionals and those in male-dominated workplaces, for all of whom there is less likely to be a gender difference in job expectations.     

ARE WOMEN REALLY MORE RISK‐AVERSE THAN MEN? A RE‐ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE USING EXPANDED METHODS

While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that ‘women are more risk averse than men’, this conclusion merits investigation. After briefly clarifying the difference between making generalizations about groups, on the one hand, and making valid inferences from samples, on the other, this essay suggests improvements to how economists communicate our research results. Supplementing findings of statistical significance with quantitative measures of both substantive difference (Cohen's d, a measure in common use in non‐Economics literatures) and of substantive overlap (the Index of Similarity, newly proposed here) adds important nuance to the discussion of sex differences. These measures are computed from the data on men, women and risk used in 35 scholarly works from economics, finance and decision science. The results are considerably more mixed and overlapping than would commonly be inferred from the broad claims made in the literature, with standardized differences in means mostly amounting to considerably less than one standard deviation, and the degree of overlap between male and female distributions generally exceeding 80%. In addition, studies that look at contextual influences suggest that these contribute importantly to observations of differences both between and within the sexes.     

Men and women as managers: A significant case of no significant difference

What does it all mean? We've reviewed five studies involving almost 2,000 people compared on a total of 43 scales. We've studied matched pairs and controlled for level of managerial achievement. And after all is said and done, we have detected a total of two overall differences between male and female managers. One of these, involving managerial work motivation, favors females: Their work motivation profiles are more “achieving” than those of their male counter-parts. The other difference, pertaining to interpersonal competence, favors the male managers: They are more open and candid with their colleagues than are females. Add to these the more titillating than significant anomalies of differing back-up style preferences and we are left with one conclusion: Women, in general, do not differ from men, in general, in the ways in which they administer the management process.Managers themselves and their subordinates concur. It seems that the disproportionately low numbers of women in management can no longer be explained away by the contention that women practice a different brand of management from that practiced by men. Whereas this may amount to good news in some quarters, we ought not be prematurely elated by discovering that women manage just the way men do. Carolyn Sherif has pointedly called attention to the fact that all is not necessarily well in today's male-oriented management activities.We of course view management in its more global aspects: The important issue to us is how an individual manages in relation to achievement criteria. Individual achievement and organizational health ultimately depend on the way management is practiced. And we now see that the way management is practiced is not related to the sex of the manager — the issue is generic rather than gender-bound.     

Noncognitive skills, occupational attainment, and relative wages

This paper examines whether men's and women's noncognitive skills influence their occupational attainment and, if so, whether this contributes to the disparity in their relative wages. We find that noncognitive skills have a substantial effect on the probability of employment in many, though not all, occupations in ways that differ by gender. Consequently, men and women with similar noncognitive skills enter occupations at very different rates. Women, however, have lower wages on average not because they work in different occupations than men do, but rather because they earn less than their male colleagues employed in the same occupation. On balance, women's noncognitive skills give them a slight wage advantage. Finally, we find that accounting for the endogeneity of occupational attainment more than halves the proportion of the overall gender wage gap that is unexplained.     

U.S. Pay Equity Legislation: Sheep in Wolves' Clothing

In the last century, women in the United States have made tremendous changes to their labor market behavior. What has not changed very much over this time period is the relative economic status of women compared to men. Another constant has been a high level of job segregation by gender, such that few organizations employ both men and women to do a particular job. These facts have led many scholars to conclude that employers systematically undervalue female-dominated jobs, and that legislative initiatives are needed to rectify this problem. This paper reviews 4 bills that have been introduced in the U.S. Congress. Each of these bills contains loopholes that would allow most employers to maintain their current pay rates. The Congressional initiatives are contrasted with a much more stringent bill that has been introduced in the New York state legislature.     

The labour market consequences of self-employment spells: European evidence

We examine how those re-entering paid-employment after a brief self-employment spell fare upon return using data from the European Community Household Panel. Unconditionally, those re-entering paid-employment appear to have considerably lower wages than those staying in the wage sector. This difference appears to be larger in Europe than in the US. Conditional analysis suggests, however, that the difference is more apparent than real: It seems that Europeans select negatively into (and possibly out-of) self-employment, i.e., the likelihood of entering (and exiting) entrepreneurship correlates negatively with unobserved ability and/or in-paid-employment productivity. Our analysis of non-wage outcomes indicates that the selection is mostly involuntary, and that for highly educated men, the brief self-employment spells are unemployment in disguise.     

Entrepreneurial intention: the role of gender

There is general agreement in previous research, drawing on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, that attitudes towards entrepreneurship are determining factors on entrepreneurial intention and gender also seems to play a key role. This study supports the core entrepreneurial intention model and focuses on the role of gender in this process, showing that men are more likely to think about creating a firm than being determined to do it. However, of those men, the ones who perceive higher congruence between masculine and entrepreneurial attributes are more likely to have a firm entrepreneurial intention. Also, both men and women with a firm entrepreneurial intention perceive successful entrepreneurs to have feminine attributes. This, together with the characteristics of the sample, may explain the lack of a gender difference in entrepreneurial intention.     

Preferences,Comparative Advantage,and Compensating Wage Differentials for Job Routinization*

I attempt to explain why there is not much evidence on compensating wage differentials for job disamenities. I focus on the match between workers’ preferences for routine jobs and the variability in tasks associated with the job. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, I find that mismatched workers earn lower wages and that both male and female workers in routinized jobs earn, on average, 5.5% and 7% less than their counterparts in non‐routinized jobs. However, once preferences and mismatch are accounted for, this difference decreases to 2% for men, and 4% for women, not statistically significant in both cases.     

Female Managers in Britain – A Comparative Perspective

The aim of this article is to present the current position of female managers in Britain and examine the similarities and differences between male and female managers. In terms of managerial efficiency and performance per se, the evidence strongly suggests that there are far more similarities than differences between the way men and women ‘manage’. However, there are some major sex differences in relation to demographic profiles, job status and employment factors, career development, occupational stress levels, and attitudes towards female managers compared to their male counterparts. One in nine managers in Britain are women and less than one per cent occupy senior management positions. Women managers tend to have to be more highly qualified than men managers, are more likely to be single or divorced, and encounter more prejudice and discrimination in the work environment. In addition, compared to male managers female managers have to cope with additional stresors stemming both from their work and home lives. It is suggested that many of these differences are hampering the career prospects of women in management and contributing towards the difficulties they have in reaching the higher levels of management compared to men. Finally, recommendations for changes in corporate and legislative policies are also proposed.