Gender and ethnic labour market differentials in Britain. An analysis using the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey

This Thesis consists of six Chapters.Chapter I provides an overview of the economic theories of discrimination,summarises the existing empirical work with respect to gender and ethnicity wagedifferentials, presents a discussion on equal opportunities policies, and highlights themerits of matched employer-employee data in explaining labour market differentials.Chapter 2 explains the design of the data, examines and interprets variables ofinterest and thoroughly looks at five aspects of the data that are of relevance to theThesis.Chapter 3 focuses on firm-specific gender and ethnicity pay differentials. Theempirical estimation reveals significant gender and ethnic pay gaps. A striking finding ofthis Chapter is that the firm-specific effects although significant and sizeable are notcorrelated with other variables that may act as indirect indicators of pay differentials.Chapter 4 focuses on gender and ethnicity job satisfaction differentials. Wefind that women are more satisfied than men in relation to four different aspects of jobsatisfaction (influence over the job, amount of pay, sense of achievement and respectfrom supervisors). An interesting difference with respect to the female results is thatethnic minority workers although are more satisfied than white employees with theinfluence, achievement and respect they get from their jobs are not satisfied with pay.Chapter 5 focuses on gender and ethnicity differentials relating to the receiptof employer provided off-the-job training. Female employees have a significantlyhigher probability of training incidence than men. This differential disappears whenwe include a measure of workplace segregation. There is no significant genderdifferential upon training intensity. Ethnic minority employees face a significantdisadvantage only with respect to the incidence of training. We also find that equalopportunities policies have a positive and significant impact only on femaleemployees.Chapter 6 concludes by reviewing the Thesis, providing policy implicationsand setting up the agenda for future work.