数字化变革、非常规技能溢价与女性就业

《财经研究》 2022年48卷第7期 页码：48 - 62  online：2022年7月1日

数字化变革、非常规技能溢价与女性就业

Digital Revolution, Non-routine Skill Premium and Female Employment

作者（中）：李建奇

作者（英）：Li Jianqi

作者单位：1.东北财经大学 经济学院, 辽宁 大连 116025

摘要：在数字技术深度渗透经济循环和政府千方百计扩大就业的背景下，尽管大量文献关注到数字化对劳动就业的影响，但却普遍忽视了最具增长潜力的女性就业。基于偏向型技术进步理论，文章将理工科技能和社交技能作为与数字化互补的非常规技能，将体力技能作为与数字化互斥的常规技能，采用职业名称词典法提取劳动者的相关技能，并利用中国劳动力动态调查（CLDS）2014—2018年数据定量分析了数字化对女性就业的影响及其作用机制。研究发现：（1）使用工具变量法和稳健性检验后的估计结果表明，数字化对女性就业有着显著的促进作用，并且相比于男性，这种促进作用偏向于女性。（2）机制分析表明，数字化通过激发女性社交技能优势、削弱男性体力技能优势和缓解性别歧视的方式提高了女性相对于男性的市场工资，进而体现出就业促进的女性偏向。（3）异质性分析发现，数字化对已婚和有幼年子女的女性依然有着显著的就业和工资收入促进作用，并且对年轻和高学历女性的促进作用更强。结论认为，数字化时代属于女性，但从长远考虑，应提高女性在理工科、逻辑思辨和人机协作等方面的能力。文章的研究为我国在数字化背景下制定教育、人口和就业政策提供了有益参考。

关键词：数字化变革; 非常规技能溢价; 女性就业; 分解

Summary: Currently, digital technology has been widely used in production and life. Digitization has both increased productivity and brought about new labor-allocation effects. Existing studies generally believe that digitalization has a positive impact on the employment and wage of workers, but there is a lack of special research on “vulnerable employment groups”. At the same time, faced with an aging population and a waning demographic dividend, the Chinese government is devoting to increasing employment opportunities. In recent years, female employment has become an important issue in the context of changes in the one-child policy and increased employment discrimination. Digitization has promoted the servitization of manufacturing and the flexibility of jobs. The labor market has provided more and more jobs suitable for women. Therefore, female employment has great growth potential. In view of this, this paper studies the impact of digitalization on female employment and its mechanism.Based on the task-biased technological progress hypothesis, this paper takes STEM skills and social skills as non-routine skills complementary to digitalization, takes physical skills as routine skills mutually exclusive to digitalization, and uses the dictionary of occupational titles to get skills of workers. Using the data of China Labor Dynamics Survey from 2014 to 2018, this paper quantitatively analyzes the impact of digitalization on female employment and its mechanism. The findings are as follows: (1) The estimation results of instrumental variable method and robustness test both show that digitization has a significant promoting effect on female employment, and the promoting effect is stronger than that of male employment. (2) The mechanism analysis shows that, with the digital revolution, females’ social skills have a higher premium, and the value of males’ physical skills gradually depreciates. Digitalization also reduces the gender discrimination of labor market, and the female-male relative market wage increases, so the employment promoting effect of digitalization is female-biased. (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows that digitalization still has a significant effect in promoting the employment and wage of women who are married or have young children, and it has a stronger effect in promoting young and well-educated women.The innovations of this paper are as follows: (1) In the digital era, artificial intelligence technology has been able to replace low and medium cognitive skills. The unique innovation lies in the critical introduction of science and engineering skills as a kind of advanced cognitive skills that women generally lack, so as to more comprehensively analyze the opportunities and challenges faced by female employment in the digital era. (2) It explains the micro mechanism of digitalization affecting female employment, points out the importance of women’s STEM skills and social skills in the digital era, and points out the alleviating effect of digitalization on gender discrimination in the labor market. (3) It deeply analyzes the interactive impact of digitalization and children care on female employment and how women could gain long-term competitive advantages in the digital era, providing useful reference for China to improve population and employment policies, and the education system in the digital era.

Key words: digital revolution; non-routine skill premium; female employment; Gelbach decomposition

DOI：10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.20220413.301

收稿日期：2021-12-6

基金项目：国家社会科学基金重大项目（21ZDA099）；国家社会科学基金青年项目（21CJY017）

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