These three all look like manifestations of a single characteristic, “initiative”, or “get-up-and-go”, but neither of those terms is good in a search engine.
This feels like a weak classification of those three points. All of those could be explained by “initiative”, sure. But you could equally explain 1 & 2 via the fact that women do more childcare, and so are less mobile for labour market purposes.
The left panels of Figure IV show that gender gaps in reservation wage and commute grow with age until the age of 40 and then begin to plateau, following a pattern quite similar to that documented in the right panels for the gender wage and commute gaps in the overall working population.
If you want to explain it via “initiative”, I think you have to have an explanation for why this change occurs (and it does seem like its generating the majority of the effect), whereas an increase in the time spent taking care of children feels like a better explanation for the data. Sadly from a quick ctrl-F I don’t think the authors determined whether women/men involved were parents, but I may be wrong.
This feels like a weak classification of those three points. All of those could be explained by “initiative”, sure. But you could equally explain 1 & 2 via the fact that women do more childcare, and so are less mobile for labour market purposes.
When I looked into this question, the paper Gender Differences in Job Search: Trading off Commute against Wage came up, where they point out:
If you want to explain it via “initiative”, I think you have to have an explanation for why this change occurs (and it does seem like its generating the majority of the effect), whereas an increase in the time spent taking care of children feels like a better explanation for the data. Sadly from a quick ctrl-F I don’t think the authors determined whether women/men involved were parents, but I may be wrong.
Yes, that could be a factor.