Testing for Glass Ceiling: An Application to the Spanish Labour Market

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to quantify gender inequality in regards to the Spanish labour market. Using this quantification in each level of promotion, we test the hypothesis of glass ceiling in the promotion of women. To achieve our aim, we follow the pseudo Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition methodology on ordered probit models. We use data from the 2001 Spanish Survey on Quality of Life at Work to estimate to what extent the differences observed between men and women in each level of promotion indicators (wages, number of promotions, levels of supervision, number of workers supervised) can be explained by differences in male and female endowments (age, number of children, marital status, mean workweek hours, size of the company, education attainment, etc.) and to what extent they are explained by other factors (gender discrimination or professional self-censoring). The results indicate that controlling for differences in observable characteristics, the gender gap in promotion tends to increase as the level of promotion rises. This might be taken as an evidence of a glass ceiling problem in the Spanish labour market.

Keywords: Glass ceiling, gender discrimination, labour market, Oaxaca decomposition, ordered probit models

JEL Classification: J71