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This paper examines the relationship between the gender wage gap and occupational gender segregation in Sweden. The results show that the gender wage gap varies substantially across occupations. It is small in male-dominated occupations and relatively large in female-dominated occupations. Further, as much as 30% of the overall gender wage gap in Sweden can be attributed to occupational segregation by gender. Finally, the return to work experience for women is substantially higher in male-dominated occupations than in female-dominated occupations, suggesting that the cost for work interruptions are lower in female-dominated occupations than in male-dominated occupations. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that women choose occupations in which the penalty for work interruptions is low. Thus, occupational segregation may arise because of gender differences in preferences for occupational characteristics and not necessarily because of discriminatory practices by employers.

Antecol (2001) finds that cultural factors play a role in explaining inter-ethnic variation in the gender wage gap across immigrant groups in the United States. This paper presents new evidence on the importance of cultural factors by exploring the relative importance of culture across specific immigrant sub-groups. More specifically, I begin with the entire immigrant sample and then progressively restrict the sample to married immigrants and then to married immigrants whose spouse is from the same country of origin. I find a positive correlation between the gender wage gaps for all immigrant groups in the United States with the same gaps in those groups’ countries of origin, however the effect is larger for married immigrants. While these results suggest the importance of cultural factors, this positive correlation is overstated when controls for differences in female labor force participation rates (LFPR) across ethnic groups are excluded, particularly for married immigrants whose spouse if from the same country of origin. Nevertheless, I also find a negative correlation between the variation in the gender wage gap of immigrants in the United States and the variation in female LFPR of immigrants in the United States, which is more consistent with unobserved cultural factors than selection of the usual type.

We analyze the evolution of the gender wage gap in Mexico between 1989 and 2012, a period in which skill-biased technological change accelerated. We deviate from most prior work investigating the gap across the wage distribution. We find substantial gender wage convergence in the decade of the 2000s at the mean and, more markedly, at the upper and lower ends of the wage distribution, alongside little change in the median wage gap. The gender wage gap at the 90th percentile was largely eliminated by the year 2012 and, at the 10th percentile, it narrowed by a fourth of its 1990 level. This narrowing of gender inequality in wages occurred alongside a narrowing of inequality in wages within each gender group. The share of college-educated women relative to men in the work force grew substantially over the two decades, and they sorted disproportionately into brain-intensive occupations, where the gender wage gap fell sharply. The wage return to being in a brain-intensive occupation was, in both periods, greater for women; it declined for men while rising for women during the 2000s. Our findings demonstrate how structural economic change may interact with a biologically premised comparative advantage of women in brain-intensive occupations to raise their relative wages. Our results also underline the relevance of studying changes across the wage distribution.

This paper analyzes the evolution of gender segregation in the workplace in Mexico between 1994 and 2004, using a matching comparisons technique to explore the role of individual and family characteristics in determining gender segregation and wage gaps. The results suggest that the complete elimination of vertical segregation would reduce the observed gender wage gaps by 5 percentage points, while the elimination of occupational segregation would have increased gender wage gaps by approximately 6 percentage points. The results also indicate that the role of occupational segregation in wage gaps has been increasing in magnitude during the period of analysis, while the role of vertical segregation on the determination of wage gaps has been decreasing.

In this paper, we update and extend “Is There a Glass Ceiling in Sweden?” (Albrecht, Björklund, & Vroman, 2003) by documenting the extent to which the gender log wage gap across the distribution in Sweden has changed over the period 1998–2008. We then examine the Swedish glass ceiling in 2008 in more detail by documenting how it differs for white-collar versus blue-collar workers and for private- versus public-sector workers. We also examine when in the life cycle the glass ceiling effect arises and how this effect develops around the birth of the first child. Finally, we investigate the possible connection between the glass ceiling and the parental leave system in Sweden by linking wage data with data on parental leave from different Swedish registers.

This paper investigates the links between statistical discrimination, mobility, tenure, and wage profiles in the early career of workers. The model assumes that female workers’ productivity is noisier and that the noise/signal ratio tapers off more rapidly for male workers. These two assumptions yield numerous theoretical predictions pertaining to gender wage gaps. These predictions are tested using data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. As predicted, we find that men and women have the same wage at the start of their career, but that female wages grow at a slower rate thus generating a gender wage gap.

With the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination in employment with respect to the hiring, promotion and pay of minorities and women became illegal in the United States.¹ Yet, 40 years later, earnings differentials still persist between certain minorities and white non-Hispanics and between women and men. For example, although the ratio of black men's earnings to those of white men and of black women's to white women's have increased considerably over the past 50 years, the black–white ratio was still only 78% in 2003 among men and 87% among women (Fig. 1). Hispanic–white wage differentials are larger than the black–white differential among both men and women (Figs. 2 and 3). And despite a significant narrowing in the gender gap, the ratio of women's earnings to men's was about 76% in 2003 (Fig. 4).²

In this paper, we use microdata on employment and earnings from a variety of industrialized countries to investigate the family gap in pay – the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children. We present results from seven countries: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. We find that there is a good deal of variation across our sample countries in the effects of children on women’s employment and in the effects of children on women’s hourly wages even after controlling for differences between women with and without children in characteristics such as age and education. We also find that the variation in the family gap in pay across countries is not primarily due to differential selection into employment or to differences in wage structure across countries. We suggest that future research should examine the impact of family policies such as maternity leave and child care on the family gap in pay.

Several studies find that there is little sex gap in wages at labor market entry, and that the sex gap in wages emerges (and grows) with time in the labor market. This evidence is consistent with (i) there is little or no sex discrimination in wages at labor market entry, and (ii) the emergence of the sex gap in wages with time in the labor market reflects differences between women and men in human capital investment (and other decisions), with women investing less early in their careers. Indeed, some economists explicitly interpret the evidence this way. We show that this interpretation ignores two fundamental implications of the human capital model, and that differences in investment can complicate the interpretation of both the starting sex gap in wages (or absence of a gap), and the differences in “returns” to experience. We then estimate stylized structural models of human capital investment and wage growth to identify the effects of discrimination (or other sources of a starting pay gap) and differences in human capital investment.