What is The Price of Freedom?: Estimating Women's Willingness to Pay for Job Schedule Flexibility

Abstract

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Words Matter: Gender, Jobs and Applicant Behavior

“…Second, we find that job ads with male gendered words related to (reduced) job flexibility are associated with higher wages but get a smaller share of female applicants. This further contributes to a gender earnings gap and is consistent with compensating differentials whereby women are willing to trade off higher wages for increased flexibility (Goldin and Katz, 2011;Goldin, 2014;Flory et al, 2015;Mas and Pallais, 2017;Wiswall and Zafar, 2018;He et al, 2019;Bustelo et al, 2020). Importantly, our results indicate that there is more than taste-based discrimination at work, so that employers (perhaps anticipating the importance of scheduling arrangements for women) frequently make explicit male requests in jobs with an inflexible schedule.…”

Words Matter: Gender, Jobs and Applicant Behavior

“…Second, we find that job ads with male gendered words related to (reduced) job flexibility are associated with higher wages but get a smaller share of female applicants. This further contributes to a gender earnings gap and is consistent with compensating differentials whereby women are willing to trade off higher wages for increased flexibility (Goldin and Katz, 2011;Goldin, 2014;Flory et al, 2015;Mas and Pallais, 2017;Wiswall and Zafar, 2018;He et al, 2019;Bustelo et al, 2020). Importantly, our results indicate that there is more than taste-based discrimination at work, so that employers (perhaps anticipating the importance of scheduling arrangements for women) frequently make explicit male requests in jobs with an inflexible schedule.…”

How does working‐time flexibility affect workers' productivity in a routine job? Evidence from a field experiment

“…A key question regarding such flexible working arrangements is why more firms do not offer them. If workers value such arrangements, they are willing to work for lower wages in exchange for such flexibility (Bustelo et al, 2022;Chen et al, 2020Chen et al, , 2019He et al, 2021;Mas & Pallais, 2017). Alternatively, when keeping pay constant, the option of such autonomy may boost a worker's productivity either by increasing their motivation or stimulating reciprocal behaviour (Beckmann et al, 2017;Rupietta & Beckmann, 2017).…”