The Effect Of Personality On Gender Wage Gap

Under the increasing reforms in the income distribution system,Chinese manufacturing industry is still facing the problem of continuously widening gender wage gaps.The issue of gender wage gap is a hot topic in sociological and economic studies.Efforts to reverse the expansion of the gender wage gap are both an important part of deepening income distribution reforms and an important part of embodying social fairness and civilization and building a harmonious society.At present,the general theoretical explanation of the gender wage gap are focusing on two theories of labor economics that are human capital theory and gender discrimination theory.The theory of human capital considers that human capital is a combination of individual productive knowledge and skills.Individual differences in investment in education and skills can lead to wage differences between workers.Differences in the human capital of male and female labor generally account for the gender wage gap 10-20%,also known as the interpretable part of the gender wage gap.In addition,a larger part of the gender wage gap is attributed to the unexplainable part,and the discriminatory theories represented by non-competitive factors such as market discrimination and statistical discrimination are more important in the gender wage gap in the labor market.The factors accounted for more than 80%of the gender wage gap.However,some scholars believe that the existing paradigm may miss the individual unobservable characteristic variables or psychological preferences for the study of the gender wage gap,and thus cannot accurately identify or exaggerate the extent of gender discrimination.With the rise of personality economics,some literatures have begun to establish the economic ties between personality traits and achievements in the labor market.They believe that micro-factors other than skills,experience,and education also pay off in the labor market.This important factor is personality traits.As a microscopic part of human capital investment,whether personality traits also have a greater explanatory effect on labor income than education investment,and it plays an important role in studying the unexplained part of the gender wage gap.This study combines the personality traits in personality economics with the gender wage gap in labor economics,theoretically sums up and summarizes the former's influence mechanism on the latter,and introduces the intrinsic micro-human capital variables of personality traits into wage decision models.In this paper,empirical analysis of the impact of personality traits on the gender wage gap was conducted using the first-hand enterprise-labor force matching survey data.In addition,this study continues the previous decomposition method using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method,trying to extend the unexplained part of the personality characteristics in the gender wage gap.Through econometric analysis,the result of this study is that personality traits,as a non-cognitive skill,have the same effect on the wage income of employees as the traditional human capital investment.Among them,the extraversion,conscientiousness,neuroticism,and openness have a positive and significant effect on the logarithm of the total sample wage income.For men,conscientiousness and openness have a significant positive impact on wage income,while women's extraversion and conscientiousness have a significant positive effect on wage income,and men's conscientiousness to wage elasticity coefficient is higher than women.According to Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition,the personality traits can increase the interpretable part of the gender wage gap,reduce the unexplained part of the gender wage gap,and reduce the proportion of unexplained parts from 82.79%to79.74%.Finally,this study puts forward some suggestions on how to narrow the gender wage gap from the three aspects of individuals,enterprises and government.