Author: Pit Bull On the National Bureau Of Economic Research Paper
Via: The Honor Network

From the Biological Gender Differences, Absenteeism and the Earning Gap

In most Western countries illness-related absenteeism is higher among female workers than among male workers. Using the personnel dataset of a large Italian bank, we show that the probability of an absence due to illness increases for females, relative to males, approximately 28 days after a previous illness. This difference disappears for workers age 45 or older. We interpret this as evidence that the menstrual cycle raises female absenteeism. Absences with a 28-day cycle explain a significant fraction of the male-female absenteeism gap. To investigate the effect of absenteeism on earnings, we use a simple signaling model in which employers cannot directly observe workers’ productivity, and therefore use observable characteristics — including absenteeism — to set wages.

Since men are absent from work because of health and shirking reasons, while women face an additional exogenous source of health shocks due to menstruation, the signal extraction based on absenteeism is more informative about shirking for males than for females. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that the relationship between earnings and absenteeism is more negative for males than for females. Furthermore, this difference declines with seniority, as employers learn more about their workers’ true productivity. Finally, we calculate the earnings cost for women associated with menstruation. We find that higher absenteeism induced by the 28-day cycle explains 11.8 percent of the earnings gender differential.

It seems the glass ceiling has a little female blood on it! Surprise surprise. This will be played to the old school crowd and thus force demands that women get extra days off, even though women have generally better resistance to disease.

If you add the effect of moms not returning to the same employer or occupation, or going part-time over full time then more the glass ceiling may almost all but disappear. In the old times a man with a family had more mouths to feed than single men and women, and helped to make companies choose married men also. Now after getting the jobs, over men many women, in countless surveys women want to give up the rat race (an option not part of any male system). So the state is forced to gather funds from kicked in the teeth dads that have no access! Look to the state trying to tax single men next (if the higher taxes aren’t already a male tax already). It’s a funny old world!

Grab the state by its financial juggler, and if bull dog or pit bull like you may risk death, but you will still will hold on to your enemy in a death grip that will bring change all the same, for some men will not let go even in death. This is what some lone wolf men have done; they should really be called lone bulldog men. By taking the assets with them they stop the state in its modivation for encouraging the breaking up of families.

I smell blood!