Gender and workload choices in the financial services industry: Evidence from the real estate brokerage

This article investigates gender differences in workload choices, job outcomes, and the trade‐off between wage and time costs in the financial services industry, where many occupations offer great flexibility and involve overlapping workload and complex job dynamics. Using granular data from real estate brokerage, we find that women appear to handle fewer listings than men and these differences are pronounced among agents likely to face tighter nonmarket time constraints. Yet women are not less capable than men of handling additional workload: conditional on the same starting pipeline and a rich set of controls, female agents are similarly responsive in acquiring new listings and more responsive in converting existing listings into sales. We further show that women face a less favorable realized commission‐time trade‐off when workload expands. Although female agents obtain larger marginal commission gains from an additional active listing, they also incur disproportionately larger marginal time costs. A back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation implies that, at the sample mean workload, the realized commission‐time trade‐off is about 15.38% less favorable for women than for men. The results suggest that lower female workload reflects both tighter nonmarket time constraints and less favorable returns to scaling workload.