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Gender pension gaps along the distribution: An application to the French case
- Carole Bonnet, Dominique Meurs, Benoit Rapoport
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- Journal:
- Journal of Pension Economics & Finance / Volume 21 / Issue 1 / January 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 August 2020, pp. 76-98
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- Article
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In this article we estimate the relative contributions to the gender pension gap of career duration and income earned at different points along the pension income distribution, as well as the role played by minimum pensions and other partly or wholly non-contributory policies in reducing this gap. Our research covers all retirees in France in 2012 employed in the public or private sector at least once in their lifetimes. We first highlight that at every point in the distribution, the gender pension gap is wider for private-sector retirees than for those in the public sector. This is because public sector careers are less fragmented and because the calculation of the public sector reference wage does not penalize career interruptions so heavily. This relative advantage of women in the public sector is probably an additional factor explaining their over-representation in this sector. Applying the decomposition method proposed by Firpo et al. (2007, 2009), we show that composition differences in the gender pension gap are essentially due to differences in contribution periods and wages, with a smaller effect of career duration in the public sector than in the private. In the first deciles, the gap can be attributed largely to differences in career duration. This effect gradually weakens, and differences in the reference wage become the main explanation. We also show that minimum contributory pensions play an extremely important role in limiting the gender pension gap in the first deciles, essentially in the private sector. Last, we show that in all cases the unexplained share of the pension gap is substantial only at the bottom of the distribution and, to a lesser extent, in the top decile. The unexplained share is generally smaller than the explained one and favours men.
12 - Discrimination Despite Integration: Immigrants and The Second Generation in Education and the Labour Market in France
- Edited by Corrado Bonifazi, Marek Okólski, Jeanette Schoorl, Patrick Simon
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- Book:
- International Migration in Europe
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 22 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 03 August 2008, pp 247-270
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Summary
For more than one and a half centuries, the ‘French model of integration’ has shaped policies and regimes concerning migrants. Even though the features of the model have encountered many changes over time, its main objective has remained quite stable: to enable immigrants to become French citizens within a generation (HCI 1993). To achieve this aim, the model prevents the reproduction of ‘foreignness’ or ‘otherness’ across generations by encouraging the naturalisation of migrants, and the automatic acquisition of French citizenship for the children of foreigners when they come of age. The key dimension of the French doctrine of integration – the implicit contract – is that the ‘invisibility’ of migrants and their descendants in public and political spheres will offer access to social mobility (Simon 2003). In return, the system grants minority groups de jure equal rights before the law regardless of their origin. The linkage between cultural assimilation and socioeconomic outcomes has been challenged by two major parameters of change: 1) the contesting of the paradigm of uniformity with requests for the recognition of ‘diversity’ in the French make-up; 2) the increase in discrimination against not only migrants but also for those belonging to the second generation, who should be protected by the legal provisions for equality.
In contrast with the classical theory of assimilation which maintains that structural assimilation in schools and the labour market (i.e. the reduction of the gaps between the status of migrants and natives) is closely linked with cultural assimilation (Alba & Nee 2003), we make the hypothesis in this paper that there is a potential mismatch between full cultural assimilation and widespread experiences of discrimination for certain groups of the descendants of immigrants in France. Evidence of quite a generalised cultural assimilation of the descendants of immigrants has already been stressed in scientific literature (Tribalat, Simon & Riandey 1996; Viprey 2002; Safi 2006). In this paper we focus on the educational attainment and position in the labour market of immigrants and the ‘second generations’. Has economic restructuring affected immigrants and subsequent generations in the same way? Or have the benefits of the ‘contract of integration’ proved able to produce equal access to socioeconomic upward mobility?