ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the gender differences in several socioemotional skills and the extent to which they explain men’s and women’s type of employment and earnings. These skills have gained increasing attention because a growing body of evidence indicates that they are at least as important as cognitive and technical skills in influencing workers’ productivity, employability, creativity and resilience. The existing literature on the relationship between these skills and labour market outcomes is largely about advanced countries, so this study about 13 middle-income countries makes an important contribution. As studies on advanced countries have found, women tend to have lower emotional stability but higher extraversion and agreeableness, while men tend to outscore women in openness in more countries. Comparing the results for socioemotional skills with the results for schooling attainment and cognitive learning, socioemotional skills are relatively less important for the probability of paid employment and earnings among women than they are among men. Diverse findings across the countries imply that specific country factors (such as gender norms, level of economic development or political history) may be mediating the influence of socioemotional skills.
