Congratulations to Prof. Dr. Timm Betz for winning 2 awards from the Southern Political Science Association for his research: the 2023 Pi Sigma Alpha "Overall Best Paper Award" for the best paper presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the SPSA and the 2023 Marian Irish Award der Southern Political Science Association for the Best Papers on Women and Politics für his paper "Representation and the Trade Roots of the Gender Pay Gap" (co-autored with David Fortunato und Diana Z. O’Brien).
The two award committees, which worked independently of each other, both highlighted the important contributions, which this innovative research makes to our empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of the often overlooked gender-specifc consequences of workforce representation, political representation and trade policy, as well as the importance of its findings for policymakers and sociey at large.
Based on fine-grained data from across sixty countries, the paper demonstrates that the more women work in an industry, the lower is the level of protectionism in that industry. And this gender-based gap in protectionism translates into striking differences in the wage-earning power of men and women, as gender representation in the workforce is skewed toward men in most industries in most countries. They also demonstrate that, the smaller the share of legislative seats held by women, the more likely does trade policy favor male-dominated industries. The historic underrepresentation of women in many governments around the world thus has contributed to the global gender wage gap.