The Glass Ceiling According to Economists

Paola Sapienza, Donald C. Clark/HSBC Chair in Consumer Finance Professor at Kellogg School of Management and alumna Bocconi, will be the keynote speaker at Gender Equality, the workshop to be held at Bocconi on Tuesday 12 December, on the occasion of the prize-giving ceremony of the UWIN – Unicredit & Universities Best Paper Award in Gender Economics, which awards the best scholarly papers of gender economics, written by young researchers from all over Europe.

Paola Sapienza's talk is entitled The Glass Ceiling: An Economist's Perspective. The workshop, organized by Paola Profeta, an economist who studies these issues at Bocconi, will also be attended by the councillor for digital transformation and civic services of the Municipality of Milan, Roberta Cocco.

Of the two papers that won this year, one (Till Money Us Do Apart: Property Division at Divorce and Married Couples' Time Use Behaviour, by Daniela Piazzalunga, University of Verona) analyses how different marital property regimes affect the way women use their time in marriage-related activities. In particular, legislation that tends to share goods in a more equal way means that women are less involved in the labor market.

The other paper ("Now She She Is Martha, then She Is Mary": The Influence of Beguinages on Attitudes Toward Women, by Èric Roca Fernández and Annalisa Frigo, University of Louvain) observes that the presence, in some Flemish cities, of Beguinages (a female movement born within the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, devoted to a semi-monastic life) has had long-term effects on the gender pay gap. Still in the 19th century, cities that had hosted a beguinage stood out for higher female literacy rate and wages.