Gender Diversity in the Norwegian Energy Sector and its Development : A descriptive and explanatory study

Abstract

Using Norwegian register data accessed through microdata.no, this thesis seeks to provide a description of gender diversity in the Norwegian energy sector, and renewables specifically. Existing research on gender diversity in the energy sectors over the world draws a picture of a male-dominated sector with a persistent gender wage gap. The thesis is divided into two main parts trying to examine the Norwegian energy sector. The first part (chapter 3) is a descriptive analysis on how female participation has evolved from 2000-2019, along with the evolution of several other key characteristics. The second part (chapter 4) attempts to assess the gender wage gap in the Norwegian energy sector using a Blinder-Oaxaca (B-O) decomposition method for the years 2014 and 2018. The aim here is to compare traditional energy to renewable energy and investigate differences in the drivers of the gender wage gap. The findings from the descriptive analysis show that there is little evidence of changes in the percentage of women in the energy workforce across almost all sub-sectors. For renewable energy sources, there is even a decline from 25% to 23% from 2010 to 2019. Regarding the gender wage gap investigation, the findings for the traditional and renewable energy sector are similar. Across all conducted regressions and samples, the unexplained part of the gap is large, meaning only a small part of the gap can be attributed to the observed variables such as education, experience, or occupations. In the B-O decomposition literature, the unexplained gap can often be (partly) attributed to discrimination. We argue that not all of the unexplained gap we find is due to discrimination in the energy sector directly, but could stem from discrimination elsewhere, such as education. There is no apparent pattern as to which of traditional and renewable energy that exhibits the smallest gender wage gap.