| dc.description.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. | en_US |
