Exploring the gender gap in a closed market niche. Explicit solutions of an ODE model (Q2140243)

The paper builds on the work by \textit{E. Accinelli} and \textit{J. Zazueta} [Exploring the gender gap in the labor market: A sex-disaggregated view, The Social Science Journal, (2021) \url{https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2021.1905398}] by simplifying the model therein and offering analytical solutions to the system of ordinary differential equations describing the growth of the numbers of males and females employed at the labor market. The model may be interpreted as a two-dimensional version of the logistic growth model where the growth term for the employee population of a given sex is a linear combination of both men and women employed (coefficients of the terms represent hiring biases towards their own sex). The overall logistic growth rate of the total employed population equals one, which is an unnecessary model constraint and may easily be dropped by assuming a constant non-unity growth rate. Analytical results for the total employment (in Section 3) follow directly from the logistic growth model and might have been introduced without elaborating own proof. The added value of the work lies in the analytical solution of the model that also allows offering an analytical expression for the gender gap in employment. Based on the proposed expressions, the authors investigate conditions for the gender gap to close asymptotically (``equality'' condition (15)). However, their main result (Theorem 5.3) is not technically correct, as there exist indefinite number of paths towards equality. The uniqueness of such solutions may only be established in the sense that any solution curve leading to equality must cross similar combination of levels of men and women employed, as established in Theorem 5.2, at some point in time. That point in time, however, is arbitrary; hence, an indefinite number of solution curves satisfy the equality condition. Technically, the problem appears in the last line of the proof to Theorem 5.3. The misfortunate formulation of the Theorem 5.3, however, does not undermine the substantive conclusion: only a specific set of initial conditions may lead to equality under any given set of model parameters. In other words, with model parameters and initial conditions set arbitrarily, the model is unlikely to lead to equality at the labor market. Here, we come to another limitation of the model regarding its relevance to real-life employment processes. In reality, the employment sectors go through numerous growth and shrinkage phases and those processes involve stochasticity. That might completely change the view to equality implications of the model parameters. Assuming, for example, indefinite number of economic swings and that laying off the labor market happens independently of the sex, one may note that long-term composition of the market will be determined by the first multipliers in Equation (1) and not by the logistic constraint terms. On the other hand, the authors might have deepened their analysis by allowing for `overemployment' solutions with \(f+m<k\), i.e., describing the labor shrinking phases within their own model. This is a missing part of the work that may be considered in a future work. As a side note, it is worth pointing to possible usefulness of the model proposed in the paper beyond modeling the employment dynamics. One may, for example, consider a logistic model for a population composed of two or more traits that may reproduce one another through mutations.