Overview
Gender equality in the workplace encompasses an array of topics. With that in mind, this panel discussion proposes a debate on two relevant issues: sexual harassment and the gender wage gap. We invited two experts on these issues to present their work. The panel concludes with a round table, including audience participation and moderated by Professor Adeline Delavande.
As many as half of all women the world over report having experienced workplace sexual harassment at some stage in their careers. Most of the existing work on this issue focuses on the impact that this has on women; however, what is the impact on firms? Professor Sonia Bhalotra and her colleagues set out a model which captures the impacts of sexual harassment on firm productivity and solves for the firm’s decisions on the total number of workers to hire and the share of female workers. The model uses firm and worker-level data from India to calibrate the model, and to produce estimates of the distortion in female share and the extent of productivity loss associated with the prevailing rate of sexual harassment.
While pay transparency is an increasingly popular policy to reduce the gender wage gap (GWG), its effectiveness is still unclear. Professor Pedro Martins and his colleagues evaluate the impact of a 2018 law in Portugal that required firms to assess their potential gender wage disparities, while imposing penalties on firms of 250 or more employees that did not correct or justify gender gaps. They found that the transparency reform had a minimal impact on reducing the GWG by around 1 percentage point (p.p.). These effects are particularly strong in firms that employ high-skilled females, and for employees that are not covered by collective bargaining, where the impacts rise to 1.5 p.p. This effect is not associated with employment effects.
Date and Time
June 6, 2025 at 4:00 pm
Venue
Sala B005 (Floor 0, Building B) at Nova SBE, Campus Carcavelos, Rua da Holanda, 1, 2775-405, Carcavelos
Agenda
4:00 – 4:35 pm Sonia Bhalotra, University of Warwick
Firm responses to legislation on sexual harassment
4:35 – 5:10 pm Pedro Martins, Nova SBE
Can transparency mandates reduce the gender wage gap?
5:10 – 5:30 pm Adeline Delavande (Moderator), Nova SBE
Round table and Q&A
5:30 – 6:00 pm Networking + Coffee break
RSVP
We kindly ask you to confirm your attendance by June 6 at 2:00 pm via email at [email protected].
Learn more about the experts
Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, UK. She is a leading expert on gender and health issues, with research spanning maternal mortality, domestic violence, gender inequality, and women’s labor market outcomes across a range of countries. She serves on the International Advisory Boards of Lancet Women, Academics Stand Against Poverty at Yale, and a UNICEF network focused on adolescents in humanitarian crises.
Pedro Martins is Professor of Economics at Nova SBE, where he also serves as Director of the Economics for Policy Knowledge Center and Deputy Academic Director of the Nova SBE Public Policy Institute. He was Secretary of State for Employment in the Portuguese government from 2011 to 2013. His research focuses on labor economics and public policy, including employment services, training, and industrial relations.
Adeline Delavande is Professor of Economics at Nova SBE with expertise in applied microeconomics, particularly development, health, education, and labor economics. Her research investigates how constraints, expectations, and preferences shape inequalities in life outcomes. She is currently President-Elect of the European Society for Population Economics and an executive board member of the Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics.
The EQUALNovaERA project is funded by the European Commission to position Nova SBE as an international leader in addressing inequalities. it recognizes that inequality is a major societal challenge, and the need to advance knowledge on the drivers and effect of inequality, and to contribute to impactful policymaking.
