Do female managers help to lower within-firm gender pay gaps? Public institutions vs. private enterprises

We analyse the link between the presence of female managers and the size of the firm-level gender pay gap. We look separately at the private and public sector, basing on a large linked employer-employee dataset for Poland. Using a non-parametric and parametric decompositions, we find that higher presence of female managers is associated with more pay advantage towards women in selected types of public sector units: the ones in which remunerations of women and men are already equal, and a large share of the workforce is tertiary-educated. The effects are, however, relatively small in size. In private establishments, lower gender wage inequality is associated with higher shares of female workers, but not female managers.