Glass Ceiling or Slippery Floors? Understanding Gender Differences in the Spanish Worker’s Compensation System

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to analyse gender differences in the Spanish workplace accident insurance or worker’s compensation (WC) system. More specifically, we are interested in understanding the differences between female and male employees in the duration of the recovery spell after a workplace accident. This will provide us with a better comprehension of the distinct opportunistic behaviour carried by men and women causing absenteeism. Our results show that women who are occupied in low-responsibility jobs experience unjustified longer periods of recovery than men. But, as the occupational ladder is climbed this pattern tends to disappear and, what is more striking, on top of the ladder women are found to be more job-committed than men. Besides, business cycle seems to have a greater effect on women than men.

Are women breaking the glass ceiling? A gendered analysis of the duration of sick leave in Spain

“…Different estimation techniques were applied to the empirical literature analyzing the duration of accident-related sick leave. Some authors used simple regression techniques, such as ordinary least squares (OLS) (Campolieti & Hyatt, 2006 ; Krueger, 1990 ) or hazard models (Corrales Herrero et al, 2008 ; Moral de Blas et al, 2012 ; Murcia López et al, 2016 ). Other works used the days out of work as a count variable and applied count data models (Delgado & Kniesner, 1997 ; Frick & Malo, 2008 ; Lechmann & Schnabel, 2014 ) or zero-inflated negative binomial models (Mukuria et al, 2017 ).…”

“…The duration of sick leave is a gender- and sex-dependent phenomenon. In general, it is well known that women tend to extend their recovery periods longer than men (Fontaneda et al, 2019 ; Moral de Blas et al, 2012 ) and there exist some hypotheses that explain this situation (Østby et al, 2018 ).…”