O emprego feminino en Galizaos cambios pendentes

Resumo

Over the last thirty years, the legal status of women has undoubtedly improved. Two of the most important achievements have been in education and the entrance to the labour market. In fact, nowadays their qualifications are higher than males in some European countries and the female labour-force participation is getting near to that of men. Nevertheless, effective equality is far from being a reality. Women are still marginalized in political and public life, they find themselves victims of poverty more often than men and they are more frequently subjected to violence. Nevertheless, Galician women had a different pattern than Spain in their entrance into the labour market since many women worked due to the male emigration. They were mainly employed in the primary sector, which was the most affected by the restructuration. Thus, the situation of women in the Galician labour market has different characteristics. In fact, Aláez, et al. (2000) estimates the gender wage discrimination for all Spanish regions and they show that Galicia is a special case. In 1995, it was the Spanish region with the lowest gender wage gap. However, after controlling for measurable characteristics related to productivity, Galicia had the highest percentage of unexplained gender wage gap, exceeded only by Murcia and the Canary Islands. This thesis attempts to cover the existing hole in the study of the womenâ¿¿s disparities in the Galician labour market. Thus, the main aim of this project is to analyse in detail the economic causes of a worrisome phenomenon, the gender discrimination in labour markets. The identification of the economic causes of the gender discrimination allows the implementation of suitable economic policies for eliminating or diminishing the discrimination. The first step in this research is to delimit the concept of gender discrimination and to distinguish it from gender disparities in Chapter 1. In this way in Chapter 2, we show the gender disparities and their evolution in the Galician labour markets relative to Spain and the European Union. We must distinguish between supply-side discrimination and demand-side discrimination. Supply-side discrimination appears in the pre-labour market, but it has effects on womenâ¿¿s characteristics and in their productivity. The supply-side discrimination is difficult to indentify and to measure because it is difficult to differentiate between womenâ¿¿s tastes. Thus, in Chapter 3 we go deeper into the determinants of the female labour-force participation as a preliminary step of the identification of the supply-side discrimination. Demand-side discrimination is not easy to measure either; nevertheless it has been much more studied. The main theories to explain it are â¿¿taste for discriminationâ¿¿ and â¿¿statistical discriminationâ¿¿. However, taste for discrimination and statistical discrimination do not exclude each other, and both sources of discrimination can coexist. Recently, a renovated theory of monopsony completes the competitive theory, and it helps to have a more complete vision of the discrimination phenomenon. In order to measure demand-side discrimination Oaxaca decomposition is usually used. Nevertheless, we are not interesting in the aggregated discrimination but in the individual discrimination. Thus, we can identify the socioeconomic groups where the discrimination is more intense. We go deeper in this point in Chapter 4.