Desigualdades en el mercado de trabajodiscriminación, segregación ocupacional y polarización. Un análisis para Colombia de 2000 a 2006

Resumen

The third objective of the UN Millennium Development Goals is “to promote gender equality and empower women” (Annan 2000). In order to make this possible, the UN established the elimination of gender inequalities in all education levels as its goal for the year 2015. The accomplishment of this goal should be reflected in equality in job opportunities, as well as in wage equality for the people that simultaneously complete each level of education and, probably, in the reduction of inequality and income polarization levels among the population. From this perspective, an integral revision of the current situation of the different gender related inequalities in the labor market becomes a key element in the formulation of policies that seek to foster the accomplishment of the Millennium Goals. In Colombia, the great majority of analyses of gender differences are limited to the study of wage differences, and little importance has been given to the differences in access to work between the two groups – which is possibly reflected in the current occupational segregation – and to the causes behind this phenomenon. At the same time, Colombia is a country with high income inequality, but the research on this subject has never been complemented with an analysis of polarization. Therefore, this study can be seen as a more holistic analysis of gender inequalities in Colombia, as it makes use of the public temporal and informational framework which is provided by the Continual Household Survey (Encuesta Nacional de Hogares, ECH from now on in the text). This survey was carried out in Colombia by the National Department of Statistics (Departamento Nacional de Estadística, DANE from now on in the text) between the years 2000 and 2006, and it gathers all employment information for the country. The data comes from a transversal reading of the survey, and it is representative of the main 13 cities in the country, both in the aggregated and disaggregated form when quarterly data is used. The analyses in this study are based on the first quarters of the years 2000, 2003 and 2006, in order to have an equal distance in time. However, one should note that 2003 was a year of major macroeconomic imbalances in the country, with record unemployment rates (17% in the aggregate of urban areas). This fact is reflected in the data and makes it difficult to infer global tendencies for the period under study. This work is organized in the following manner: The first chapter points out the methodological weaknesses of the current tools used to analyze gender related wage differences and the problems they present to answering relevant questions for economic theory. This exercise also tries to make the reader familiar with the Colombian data. Likewise, an interesting application about occupational segregation in the city of Cali is presented, which empirically shows how a priori definitions, which are necessary for the analysis, extremely influence its results. The methodological problems that are pointed out in this chapter have guided the development of the other two chapters, because the original idea was to link the concept of wage differences to occupational segregation (and, if possible, to income polarization), but the revision of the empirical conclusions led to research the two subjects separately and to offer a different methodological proposal on occupational segregation. The second chapter deals with the first of the above mentioned subjects by showing a novel analysis of gender related wage differences through discrimination curves, proposed by Del Rio, Gradín and Cantó (2004). This analysis, unlike the traditional literature based on average decompositions (see Oaxaca (1973), Blinder (1973) Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1993), Flückiger and Silber (1999), among others), calculates, for each woman, how much she could earn given her productive capabilities, if she could have access to the same male remuneration in the labor market. This information can be analyzed in an absolute and in a relative way. From the absolute point of view, the differences show how much a woman loses per hour because her productive characteristics are not remunerated at the same level as those of men are. From the relative point of view, for each woman they show the income percentage that is missing in order for women not to be discriminated against anymore. Both analyses are complementary, and while the first one measures the monetary losses due to discrimination, the second one provides an idea of the losses in womens' well-being suffered by each discriminated person. This methodology also allows, amongst other things, to approach the subject of occupational segregation in a different manner to the one shown in chapter one. In this way, it is not necessary to group the original occupational classification based on the conditions of the womens' income vector in absence of discrimination a priori. These estimates also allow us to quantify how many women in the available sample are suffering from a certain level of discrimination, how unequal the level of discrimination is and the intensity of this phenomenon. This information is summarized in the discrimination curves, which are an adaptation of the TIP curves proposed by Jenkins and Lambert (1997). Among the results that had not been previously calculated for Colombia, it should be highlighted that in each year under study, at least 95% of the women suffered from discrimination at some level, this being understood as differences in their remuneration when compared to the income that a man with the same productive characteristics would receive. It should also be noted that the only exception to this rule are women with university education, and that those that suffer a higher degree of absolute discrimination in traditional female employment, like sales, working in restaurants and in hotels. The third chapter deals again with the concept of segregation and, unlike chapter one where the concept was implicitly assumed, this chapter discusses the theoretical problems related to the measurements of segregation proposed by different authors. As an empirical novelty, the evolution of these indicators for the main 13 Colombian cities is shown, as well as evidence of the ordering problems that result from choosing a particular index. This leads to the methodological proposal of the chapter, which consists in the development of a synthetic index for segregation, based on the work of Domínguez and Núñez (2007) on inequality. This index is not only a new development for the Colombian case, but also for the literature on occupational segregation. The fourth chapter analyzes, for the first time for Colombia, the level of income polarization, and establishes differences between the income distribution of men and women. The analysis is based on recent developments in the subject proposed by Wolfson (1994, 1997), Esteban and Ray (1994) and Esteban, Gradin and Ray (1999). In the bibliography for Colombia, only two studies on polarization can be found, which seek to analyze the convergence of per capita income among states (see Bonet and Meisel 2006, and Espitia 2006). However, although there is a high level of inequality in the individual distribution of income in Colombia, a study on polarization complementary to those of inequality could not be found among the bibliography for the country. This text ends with a summary of the main conclusions that can be derived from the analysis and with the proposal of several lines of research that are opened by it.