Are employment effects of gender discrimination important? Some evidence from Great Britain

Interpreting the unexplained component of the gender wage gap as indicative of discrimination, the empirical literature to date has tended to ignore the potential impact wage discrimination may have on employment. Employment effects may arise if discrimination lowers the female offered wage and the labour supply curve is upward sloping. The empirical analysis employs the British Household Panel Study and finds evidence of both wage and associated employment effects.

Projections of the future path of the gender wage gap in Great Britain

Purpose – The paper attempts to project the future trend of the gender wage gap in Great Britain up to 2031.
Design/methodology/approach – The empirical analysis utilises the British Household Panel Study Wave F together with Office for National Statistics (ONS) demographic projections. The methodology combines the ONS projections with assumptions relating to the evolution of educational attainment in order to project the future distribution of human capital skills and consequently the future size of the gender wage gap.
Findings – The analysis suggests that gender wage convergence will be slow, with little female progress by 2031 unless there is a large rise in returns to female experience.
Originality/value – The paper has projected the pattern of male and female skill acquisition together with the associated trend in wages up to 2031.

Of great love and immense hate: the ambivalence of the other in a local/global school

In recent times, and in times of insurgent globalisation, modern notions of identity and with them, conceptions of essential and primordially defined difference seem to have fallen apart. Identity is understood as post-modern, a ‘moveable feast’ of ever-in-process, negotiated differences. The examination of the material and conceptual terms and conditions that position these logics otherwise suggests that these arguments remain tied within conceptions of ourselves made through the ambivalent conceptions of others. In this paper, I trace these paradoxical relations as they are represented in a particular local Melbourne school at each end of a decade and at a time of increasing demographic change and global transformation. Teachers and parents understood and defined their identities and the identities of others in ways that were increasingly fragmented, changing and complex. Beneath these changing patterns, they continued to define others as different and as not us in ways that were ambivalent and extreme. These negotiations took place differently in recent years as the definitions of essential notions of identity changed and became more complex to define. Nevertheless, they continued as ambivalent stories of otherness that transversed the tortuous spectrum between orientalism and nativism speculated upon in post-colonial writings.

Do cuckoos choose nests of great reed warblers on the basis of host egg appearance?

Prevailing theory assumes cuckoos lay at random among host nests within a population, although it has been suggested that cuckoos could choose large nests and relatively active pairs within host populations. We tested the hypothesis that egg matching could be improved by cuckoos choosing nests in which host eggs more closely match their own, by assessing matching and monitoring nest fate in great reed warblers naturally or experimentally parasitized by eggs of European cuckoos. A positive correlation between cuckoo and host egg visual features suggests that cuckoos do not lay at random within a population, but choose nests and this improves egg matching: naturally parasitized cuckoo eggs were more similar to host eggs as perceived by humans and as measured by spectrophotometry. Our results suggest a hitherto overlooked step in cuckoo-host evolutionary arms races, and have nontrivial implications for the common experimental practice of artificially parasitizing clutches.

The demise of Bicycle George : a life of crime

This short piece looks at the life of a murderer, George Blunderfield (alias Arthur Oldring), who was hanged in Melbourne in 1918. Melburnians, or visitors to the city, may have seen his image on the wall at the Old Melbourne Gaol. Blunderfield's life started out normally
enough, and then descended into horrific crime. His story includes bicycle racing, escape from an island prison, and then recruitment for service with the Australian Imperial Forces in wartime Victoria. In the last years of his life, Blunderfield wreaked havoc from the western to the eastern coasts of Australia. This in turn had a dramatic effect on his immediate family, which is also detailed here. This story draws on the archives at PROV as well as on State Records Office of Western Australia material, with help from Ms Jean
Bellamy, a distant relative of George Blunderfield.