The Evolution of Gender in the Labour Market
Presented by Professor Jessica Pan from the National University of Singapore, this talk traces the evolution of gender studies, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved, and how past insights inform current perspectives on addressing the remaining gender disparities in the labour market.
Current academic thinking emphasises two fundamentally different explanations for the existence of gender gaps — essential differences in preferences/skills between men and women, versus gender differences in constraints. Professor Pan discusses insights from economics and social psychology research on the relative importance of these explanations and the implications for economic efficiency. She also provides an in-depth review of recent literature emphasising the role of children and family responsibilities as a major source of differential barriers to labour market success by gender and how this interplays with gender norms and discrimination.
About the speaker - Professor Jessica Pan
Jessica Pan is Professor of Economics, Vice Provost (Graduate Education), and Dean of the NUS Graduate School at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). She received a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Chicago, followed by an MBA and PhD from UChicago’s Booth School of Business.
Professor Pan’s research focuses on applied topics in labour economics and the economics of education. Her recent work focuses on gender differences in labour market and educational outcomes; international migration and the labour market effects on source and host countries; and topics in labour economics such as discrimination, marriage markets, and the return to education. Her work has been published in several leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. She currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. She’s also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and Secretary (President-designate) of the Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics (AASLE).
About Colin Clark Memorial Lecture
The Colin Clark Memorial Lecture is our most prestigious annual event, now in its 33rd year.
It is held each year to recognise Dr Colin Clark’s outstanding contribution to the field of economics. Dr Colin Clark was a UQ Economics academic whose work on national income accounting was fundamentally important to the development of macroeconomics and to the approach of John Maynard Keynes. Dr Clark's greatest contribution to economics was his pioneering role in the construction of national accounts.