Original title: Foreign ownership and transferring of gender norms
The researchers study Swedish companies that become foreign-owned. They compare the pay gap between men and women within those firms with the level of gender equality in the investors’ home country. After acquisitions by investors from more gender-equal countries, the gap tends to shrink. Acquisitions from less gender-equal countries have no significant effect on the gap.
Imagine a new family taking over a neighborhood shop. The way they treat workers may reflect the rules they brought from home. It is hard to tell whether those rules changed pay or whether something else changed at the same time. In this paper, the new family stands for foreign investors, and the shop’s pay gap is compared with the investors’ home country’s level of gender equality.
Workers in companies bought by foreign investors may be affected by the gender norms of the investors’ home country. In Sweden, acquisitions from countries with greater gender equality tend to reduce the pay gap between men and women inside the acquired firms; acquisitions from less equal countries show no significant impact.
The abstract reports results for Swedish firms and does not establish whether the same pattern holds in other countries. It says acquisitions from less gender-equal countries have no significant impact, not that they have no effect at all. It does not describe the size of the pay-gap changes or establish which specific workplace practices cause them.
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Foreign ownership and transferring of gender norms — Daniel Halvarsson, Olga Lark, Patrik Gustavsson Tingvall — Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d économique — doi:10.1111/caje.70094
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.