The labor market in the Spanish hospitality industry: An overview from a gender perspective

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to analyze the labour market of the hospitality industry in Spain from a gender perspective. For this proposal, we analyze the effects of educational mismatch on workers’ occupational mobility and on gender wage inequality. In addition to these effects, the decomposition of the gender wage gap, based on an explicit theoretical approach, is controlled by different types of gender segregation and indicators of internal and external mobility. Our indicator of workers' educational mismatch is based on the comparison between the worker's level of education and the educational level required to perform his/her job; the analysis of internal and external labour mobility is based on logit models and for analyzing the gender wage gap decomposition we used a version of the well-known Oaxaca-Ramson´s (1994) approach. The data source used in this study is generated for a survey which collected the opinion of 2476 workers in hospitality firms with 7 or more employees. The evidence shows not only that external mobility is far higher than internal mobility in this sector, but also that is the main cause of wage inequality between men and women. This fact can be explained by labor discrimination against women who have no access to labor improvements in the same conditions than men. Educational mismatch has a limited effect on internal and external mobility for both genders. Thus, entry positions do not serve as first step in the worker´s future career in this sector. Finally, gender discrimination, which explains most of the gender wage inequality, is mainly due to horizontal segregation effect and discrimination of women regarding external mobility.