Persistent inequality, but not a glass ceiling: On gender and workplace authority
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22325/fes/res.2021.43Keywords:
Workplace authority, gender gap, glass ceiling, gender inequality, Erik WrightAbstract
The aim of this article is to study gender inequality in workplace authority in Spain, taking Erik Wright's contributions as a starting point. I describe the magnitude, shape and temporal variation of inequality in Spain and I test the "glass ceiling" hypothesis, i.e., the hypothesis that women face a more intense disadvantage at highger levels of the authority hierarchy than at the bottom. I use data from the "Survey on Class Structure, Class Consciousness and Class Biography" (1991), the "Socio-demographic Survey" (1991), the "Survey on Quality of Life at Work" (1999-2004) and serveral annual subsamples of the "Labour Force Survey" (2006-2013). It is concluded that in Spain men and women have unequal probabilities of holdiing authority positions at the workplace, but evidence does not support the "glass ceiling" hypothesis.
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