Gender diversity, productivity, and wages in Egyptian firms

Abstract EN

Women’s employment is not evenly distributed across sectors and this variance in gender diversity can impact firms’ productivity and wages.

Using the newly available EC 2013 dataset, this paper explores the relationship between gender diversity, productivity, and wages.

Our first finding is that gender diversity is positively associated with productivity and wages in the knowledge-intensive service sector.

This result is consistent with the notion that higher gender diversity increases heterogeneity of beliefs and values, and thus may be linked to greater critical thinking required in knowledge-based industries.

Our second finding is that there is a negative or no association with productivity and wages among less knowledge-intensive service and both high- and low-tech manufacturing firms.

These relationships are robust across different industry classifications and measures of diversity