Gender gaps in skills, tasks, and employment outcomes

This report studies the gender differences in job tasks and their relationship with two
important labour market outcomes: wages and skills mismatch. We disentangle gender gaps in occupational tasks and within-occupation, worker-level tasks, using worker-level PIAAC and EWCS data. We find that women perform more routine intensive tasks than men, even more so in more developed countries. Moreover, women face larger pay penalties for working in more routine-intensive occupations. Within occupations, women perform more routine intensive tasks, but the associated pay penalties are, on average, similar to those experienced by men. We also show that in countries with more gender equal legislation and more egalitarian norms, the
contribution of job tasks to the gender wage gap tends to be smaller. Analysing the incidence of skills mismatch, we show that the over-skilling decreased between 2005 and 2015, while under-skilling increased over this period, both for men and women. The expansion of non-routine cognitive occupations (analytical and interpersonal) induced by digitalisation can partially explain these changes in the incidence of skills mismatch. Women performing non- routine cognitive tasks (both analytical and interpersonal) are more likely to be under-skilled and less likely to be over-skilled. Among men, these links hold for non-routine analytical tasks only.