Topic Gender

Do Women in Highly Qualified Positions Face Higher Work-To-Family Conflicts in Germany than Men?

Changing employment conditions lead to new chances, but also new risks for employees. In the literature, increasing permeability between occupational and private life is discussed as one special outcome of this development that employees must face, especially those in highly qualified positions. Drawing on existing research, we investigate in how far women and men in those positions differ in their ...

Do Women in Highly Qualified Positions Face Higher Work-To-Family Conflicts in Germany than Men?

Changing employment conditions lead to new chances, but also new risks for employees. In the literature, increasing permeability between occupational and private life is discussed as one special outcome of this development that employees must face, especially those in highly qualified positions. Drawing on existing research, we investigate in how far women and men in those positions differ in their ...

Top Decision-Making Bodies in Large Companies: Gender Quota Shows Initial Impact on Supervisory Boards ; Executive Board Remains a Male Bastion

The gender quota for supervisory boards that has been mandatory since January 2016 has shown an initial impact. According to DIW Berlin’s Women Executives Barometer, at the end of 2016, there were more women on the supervisory boards of the 106 companies subject to the statutory quota than one year before. Their proportion increased by a solid four percentage points to more than 27 percent. And in ...

Financial Sector: Banks Fall behind and Now Have a Lower Proportion of Women on Executive and Advisory Boards than Insurance Companies

Women are still in the clear minority among the financial sector’s top decision-making bodies. According to DIW Berlin’s Women Executives Barometer, at the end of 2016, 21 percent of the supervisory and administrative board members of the 100 largest banks were female. The number has stagnated compared to last year. Since 2010, when the discussion about the gender quota for supervisory boards gained ...

Companies Should Have More Women on All Levels of the Hierarchy: Seven Questions for Elke Holst

The Gender Gap in Competitiveness: Women Shy away from Competing with Others, but Not from Competing with Themselves

Women are less willing than men to compete against others. This gender gap can partially explain the differences between women’s and men’s education and career choices, and the labor market disparities that result. The experiments presented here show that even though women are less willing than men to compete against others, they are just as willing as men are to take on the challenge of improving ...

Fathers, Parental Leave and Gender Norms

Social norms and attitudes towards gender roles have been shown to have a large effect on economic outcomes of men and women. Many countries have introduced policies that aim at changing gender stereotypes, for example fathers’ quota in parental leave schemes. In this paper, we analyze whether the introduction of the fathers’ quota in Germany in 2007, that caused a sharp increase in the take-up of ...

Peer Effects in Parental Leave Decisions

This paper analyzes to what extent parental leave decisions of mothers with young children depend on the decisions made by their coworkers. The identification of peer effects, which are defined as indirect effects of the behavior of a social reference group on individual outcomes, bears various challenges due to correlated characteristics within social groups and endogenous group membership. We overcome ...

Better Career Opportunities for Women Will Help Lower the Gender Pay Gap: Nine Questions to Elke Holst

Women's Likelihood of Holding a Senior Management Position Is Considerably Lower than Men's - Especially in the Financial Sector

Women remain grossly underrepresented in management positions in Germany. However, what has been dubbed the gender leadership gap, i.e., the difference between the share of all employees who are women and the share of women in senior management positions, varies considerably across different industries. The present report shows that the largest gender gap in the likelihood of holding a senior management ...