| dc.description.abstract | Gender wage gap have declined over the past decades with the progression of society and legal
enforcement of equal wages. However, there is still existence of quite a significant gender
wage gap even in developed countries. There are number of theories that have emerged
regarding the psychological orientation of women that are likely to be responsible for the
prevalence of gender wage. But most of these studies either focuses on the demand side in
isolation that is the gender discrimination in the hiring decision of employer or supply side in
isolation that is the employee productivity in terms of competitiveness and effort exertion of
employees. In this paper I have investigated both the supply and demand side of the labour
market through two experiments on the online labour market. The results of these two
experiment shows that both male and female are responsive to wages but depending on the
intrinsic motivational factor of the task they respond to wages differently. The effort exertion
of women are slightly more responsive to wages again depending on the nature of the task.
However on the supply side, the employer are agnostic about gender in a setting where gender
discrimination would clearly hurt profitability of the employers. The two most important
conclusion that can be drawn from this paper is that understanding intrinsic motivation of
employees can align performance with incentives allowing both employer and employees to
optimize utility. Second, the lower math score of female can be translated into higher gender
wage gap because different literature have found that math related job have better pay
structure. Hence, the self-selection of women into low paying jobs are at the heart of gender
wage gap according to the results in this paper. | nb_NO |
