Gender Differences in Quits and Absenteeism in Canada
by Xuelin Zhang
Business and Labour Market Analysis Division
Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series, No. 296
Context
The gender differences in labour market outcomes such as wages and career attainment are important concerns for policy makers and the public. One explanation for these differences is that women are more likely to quit, more likely to be absent and to take more days of absence than men. Since quits and absences are costly to employer, a cost-minimizing employer would hesitate to hire, train or promote female workers, and would also pay them lower wages. However, it is widely observed that women's labour force attachment has become much stronger in recent years. It would be interesting to ask whether the traditional view on women's quitting and absence behaviour is still valid.
Objective(s)
This study documents the gender differences in quits and absenteeism in Canada and attempts to assess whether the traditional view is still valid today.
Findings
The study found that Canadian women's quitting behaviour changed dramatically over the past two decades. While women's permanent quit rate was greater than that of men in the 1980s, it converged with men's permanent quit rate since the early 1990s, and today there does not seem to be any significant difference in quitting behaviour between Canadian men and women. In terms of absenteeism, it was found that, other things being equal, Canadian men and women were somewhat different in paid sick leave, not in other paid and unpaid leaves, and their difference in paid sick leave was not large: women took only one day more than men.
Taken together, these results imply that, in Canada, the current gender differences in quits and absenteeism are not significant factors to explain certain gender differences in labour market outcomes, such as the wage gap between men and women.
Data source(s)
The uses the Longitudinal Worker File (LWF) over the 1983-to-2003 to examine the annual quit rates of Canadian men and women the data from Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) 1999 and 2001 to examine gender differences in absenteeism.
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