Unfair tournaments: gender stereotyping and wage discrimination among Italian graduates

This paper addresses the gender pay gap among Italian university graduates on entry to the labor market, and stresses the importance of gender stereotypes on subjective assessment of individual productivity. We build upon previous research about gender and wage inequality introducing tournament theory as a convenient framework for the gender pay gap analysis. We hypothesize that the effects of gender stereotypes make occupational tournaments unfair. As a consequence, male workers have higher probabilities of winning the wage competition. Our data show that in contexts where the stereotype is most likely to occur, making tournaments less fair, the unexplained component of the gender pay gap is higher.