This paper investigates whether personality traits can explain glass ceilings (increasing gender wage gaps across the wage distribution). Using longitudinal survey data from Germany, I combine unconditional quantile regressions with wage gap decompositions to identify the effect of personality traits on gender gaps and investigate potential channels of the effect. The results suggest that the impact of personality traits on wage gaps increases across the wage distribution. Personality traits explain up to 14% of the overall gender wage gap at the top of the wage distribution and around 7-9% at the mean. The effect is mostly driven by direct wage effects (potentially through productivity or bargaining behavior) of certain traits that differ between men and women, while access to jobs and discrimination of women based on personality traits play a minor role.

本文研究人格特质是否可以解释玻璃天花板（在工资分配中增加性别工资差距）。使用来自德国的纵向调查数据，我将无条件分位数回归与工资差距分解相结合，以确定人格特质对性别差距的影响，并研究这种影响的潜在渠道。结果表明，人格特质对工资差距的影响在整个工资分配中都在增加。在工资分配的顶部，人格特质解释了总性别工资差距的14％，而平均水平则解释了大约7-9％。这种影响主要是由男女之间某些特征所产生的直接工资效应（可能是通过生产力或讨价还价行为）造成的，