Culture

Cyprien Batut, Caroline Coly, Sarah Schneider-Strawcznski

Sexual harassment and sexists behaviors are pervasive issues in the workplace. Around 12% of women in France have been subjected to toxic behaviors at work in the last year, including sexist comments, sexual or physical harassment, or violence. Such toxic behaviors can not only deter women from entering the labor market, but can also lead them to leave toxic workplaces at their own expense. This article is one of the first to examine the relationship between toxic behaviors and worker flows. We use the #MeToo movement as an exogenous shock to France's workplace norms regarding toxic behaviors. We combine survey data on reported toxic behaviors in firms with exhaustive administrative data to create a measure of toxic behaviors risk for all French establishments. We use a triple-difference strategy comparing female and male worker flows in high-risk versus low-risk firms before and after #MeToo. We find that #MeToo increased women's relative exit rates in higher-risk workplaces, while men's worker flows remained unaffected. In particular, we see that women are more likely to quit their job and to experience a wage penalty as a result of switching job. This demonstrates the existence of a double penalty for women working in high-risk environments, as they are not only more frequently the victims of toxic behaviors, but are also forced to quit their jobs in order to avoid them.

Monica Bozzano, Paola Profeta, Riccardo Puglisi, Simona Scabrosetti

European Journal of Political Economy (2024)

We investigate the role played by gender equality in redistributive policies through taxation and in preferences for redistribution. First, at the cross-country level, we study how the historical roots of gender equality –i.e., the time of women’s enfranchisement and the role of women in the family– are related with the level of redistribution through taxation. We find that in countries that are historically more gender equal the tax system today is more redistributive. Second, at the individual level, in order to shed light on the cross-country evidence, we investigate whether gender equality is related with overall and/or gender-specific differences in preferences about redistribution. We find that in more gender-equal countries gender differences in redistributive preferences are significantly larger, while their average level does not vary: when gender equality is stronger, women are systematically more favorable to redistribution, whereas there are no significant changes for men. In turn, the component of gender equality driving this result is –not surprisingly– the equality of women and men within the political sphere.

Graziella Bertocchi, Arcangelo Dimico

Dondena Working Paper No. 145 (2021)

The mounting evidence on the demographics of COVID-19 fatalities points to an overrepresentation of minorities and an underrepresentation of women. Using individual-level, race-disaggregated, and georeferenced death data collected by the Cook County Medical Examiner, we jointly investigate the racial and gendered impact of COVID-19, its timing, and its determinants. Through an event study approach we establish that Blacks individuals are a ected earlier and more harshly and that the e ect is driven by Black women. Rather than comorbidity or aging, the Black female bias is associated with poverty and channeled by occupational segregation in the health care and transportation sectors and by commuting on public transport. Living arrangements and lack of health insurance are instead found uninuential. The Black female bias is spatially concentrated in neighborhoods that were subject to historical redlining.