Do We Discount Female Labour Force Participation for their Domestic Responsibilities?

Abstract This paper analyses how gender-specific labour responds to the self-perceived relationship between effort and performance. This paper decomposes, probes, and plots two-way interactions in linear regression: first at a regional-level followed by a firm-level. For regional-level analysis, we made use of the Proportional Odds (PO) model. To check the micro-level robustness of inter-gender wage variation within an education-sector firm, we conducted a field experiment. We exogenously manipulate subjects' beliefs about the effort-performance relationship by assigning them to different, verifiable information treatments, each of which provides factual information. We found that subjects change their work effort in the same direction with the shifts in their beliefs about the elasticity of returns to effort. Furthermore, the experiment suggests that although the effort put forth by subjects increases the real wage they receive monotonically, when gender-based separation is considered, we found that the real wage received for similar hours of labour is discounted more for females than males; the variability in effort is also higher among females compared to males post mandatory work hours. We found a dip in the effort–performance relationship at the post-graduation level work environment. The study highlighted the higher rate of discount on female labour force participation, even in the higher education sector, which invariably requires highly qualified and skilled labour irrespective of gender.