Full Citation
Title: Gender Differences in Careers and Pay: Changes in the US Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2021
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20211020
NSFID:
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Abstract: In the 1960s, landmark legislation targeted the long-standing practice of labor market discrimination against US women. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), became the first piece of federal legislation mandating equal pay for equal work. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act followed in 1964 with a provision that more broadly prohibited any sex-based discrimination in employment. Complementing this legislation, the 1961 and 1966 FLSA amendments increased the real minimum wage by 24 percent by 1970 and almost doubled the number of workers it covered, extending the FLSA’s provisions to an additional 22.6 million individuals (US Department of Labor 1961, 1970). These changes benefited many workers in some of the economy’s lowest-earning industries, such as services, retail trade, and government (that is, schools and hospitals)—industries where many women worked. Yet the gender gap in pay was unchanged over the 1960s. Figure 1 shows that the ratio of women’s to men’s median annual and weekly wages for full-time, full-year (FTFY) workers hovered around 60 percent of men’s until the early 1980s (Blau and Kahn 2017). This paper examines changes in the distribution of wages for clues about the persistence of the gender gap in the 1960s. Our key finding is that the 1960s witnessed large increases in women’s relative pay in the lower part of the wage distribution, where the Equal Pay Act, Title VII, and the FLSA would have tended to increase wages. These gains are not explained by improvements in working women’s observed characteristics and run contrary to simple models of negative selection, which predict that women’s increased entry into the labor market would tend to decrease wages in the lower part of the skill distribution (Beller 1977, Heckman 1979).
Url: http://bryan-stuart.com/files/BaileyHelgermanStuart_AEAPP.pdf
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Authors: Bailey, Martha J.; Helgerman, Thomas; Stuart, Bryan A.
Periodical (Full): AEA Papers and Proceedings
Issue:
Volume: 111
Pages: 143-148
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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