The U.S. Gender Pay Gap in the 1990S: Slowing Convergence
By Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn. Social Science Research Network, 2006
617 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, the authors study the slowdown in the convergence of female and male wages in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. They find that changes in human capital did not contribute to the slowdown, since women's relative human capital improved comparably in the two decades. Occupational upgrading and deunionization had a larger positive effect on women's relative wages in the 1980s than in the 1990s, explaining part of the slower 1990s convergence. However, the largest factor was a much faster reduction of the “unexplained” gender wage gap in the 1980s than in the 1990s. The evidence suggests that changes in labor force selectivity, changes in gender differences in unmeasured characteristics and in labor market discrimination, and changes in the favorableness of demand shifts each may have contributed to the slowing convergence of the unexplained gender pay gap.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3eba1f23216d83f85f60eab75c27f2014341641b
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Marianne Bertrand
- Lise Vesterlund
- Claudia Goldin
- Jessica Pan
- Le Wang
- Muriel Niederle
- Esfandiar Maasoumi
- Daniela Vuri
In Gender Studies
- Jessica Pan
- Marianne Bertrand
- Shelley J. Correll
- Muriel Niederle
- S. Benard
- Claudia Goldin
- Esfandiar Maasoumi
- Le Wang
Citations in the corpus
- Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households (2013, background): “Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.”
- How Costly Is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness (2013, positive): “Only 30% of students at top tier business schools are women, and, relative to their male counterparts, female MBA’s are more likely to work in the nonprofit sector, work part time, or drop out of the work force (e.g., Hewlett and Luce 2005, Blau and Kahn 2006).”
- Choosing to Compete: How Different are Girls and Boys? (2012, neutral): “2.See for example Albrecht, Bjorklund and Vroman (2003), Blau and Kahn (2004) , and Arulampalam,”
- The Gender Gap between Earnings Distributions (2019, methodology): “Themovements impliedby conventionalmeasures have beennoted in the literature (e.g., Blau and Kahn 2006).”
- Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?1 (2007, background): “While the magnitude of the gap decreased over much of this period (Charles and Grusky 2004; Blau and Kahn 2004), a sizeable gap remains, and the gap has not narrowed in recent years (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2006).”
- Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, neutral): “Studies of aggregate trends tend to find no impact (or small positive impacts) of unionization on this gap (Antonczyk and Sommerfeld, 2010; Blau and Kahn, 2006).”
- Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy (2008, background): “…gender differences in wages (Mincer and Polachek 1974, Mincer and Ofek 1982, Light and Ureta, 1995, O’Neill 2003, Polachek 2006), although others have argued that human capital factors account only for a small component of the gender pay gap (Altonji and Blank 1999, Kunze 2005, Blau and Kahn 2006).”