Is There Labor Market Discrimination Among Professionals In Chile? Lawyers, Doctors And Business-People

Abstract

This paper presents a complete analysis of the gender differences in three Chilean professional’s labor market: Business, Law and Medicine. In the analysis, we utilize a new and rich data set collected for this effect. This data set contains information on labor market outcomes (including labor history), on schooling attainment and schooling performance and a complete set of variables characterizing the family background of the individuals in the sample. In addition, the survey contains an individual test on non cognitive abilities. Following recent studies we took Rotter (1966) and Rosemberg (1965) tests for noncognitive abilities and we constructed two measures of non cognitive abilities. One is related to self control and the other is related to selfesteem. Our results show that differences in wages attributed to gender are only present in the Law profession. In the Business/Economics profession a vector of current family condition makes the gender effect disappear and in Medicine taking into account hours worked, size of the firm and region make also the gender gap vanish. In addition, we show that the level of self control is a relevant variable in explaining the distribution of earnings.