“Women’s Wages”: Job Title Crafting as response to Antidiscrimination Legislation in West Germany

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 22: Organizational Mechanisms of Gender Inequality

Abstract

How do labor markets respond to legal prohibitions of discrimination? Beyond adjusting wages and employment, firms may strategically redesign job titles to preserve pay differentials. We study this mechanism in the context of a 1955 German court ruling that mandated the abolition of explicitly gendered job titles. Exploiting staggered renegotiation dates of sectoral bargaining agreements, we show that eliminating ``women's wages'' reduced the gender pay gap. However, the effect was almost fully offset for women in jobs with no formal training requirements by the introduction of new job titles for ``untrained workers in physically less demanding jobs'' (Leichtlohngruppen). Our results highlight how worker reclassification can attenuate the effects of equal pay mandates.

Author

• Alexander Busch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology