Alexandra Roulet is among the three economists, excluding the winner, who were selected by the jury bringing together representatives of the Circle of Economists and the World, for their work relating to applied economics and promoting public debate.
A specialist in the labor market, you have conducted research on the origin of the wage gap between women and men. How is your work innovative?
In the early 1990s, in annual income, women earned 40% less than men. Today, we are more at 20%. And, taking into account the differences in working time, in hourly wages, the gap fell from 25% to around 15%. Wage inequalities between women and men are being reduced, which is a good thing. But there remains a residual gap, the causes of which I have tried to understand, by changing the angle.
With two co-authors, Thomas Le Barbanchon and Roland Rathelot, we considered that a job is not just a salary. Remuneration is not the only criterion for choosing a job. And it turns out that women place more importance than men on non-salary aspects. For example, they are more reluctant to have long journey times. When they are looking for a job, the travel time they say they are ready to accept is lower than that of men. And when you look at accepted jobs, their commuting time is actually less than that of men. The counterpart is sometimes a lower salary.
Have you quantified the impact?
All other things being equal, this difference in the value of travel time would explain 10% to 15% of the residual wage gap between women and men. Our research does not allow us to say whether these choices are free or imposed according to social norms, family constraints, etc., but this is not the result of the behavior of employers.
Moreover, there is another aspect of the inequalities on which I worked with Marco Palladino and Mark Stabile, it is the type of company where men and women work. With the same skills, same trades and in a given sector, women are under-represented in companies that pay very well. The phenomenon is accentuated between the ages of 30 and 40, probably in connection with family constraints. It is noteworthy that progress in reducing inequalities has not affected this dimension. My hypothesis is, again, that women value non-salary aspects more than men in their business choices: flexibility of hours, culture and size of the company, etc.
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