Full Citation
Title: The Minimum Wage and the Gender Wage Gap in the United States
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2015
ISBN:
ISSN: 21939020
DOI: 10.1186/S40175-015-0044-4
NSFID:
PMCID:
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Abstract: Since the 1980s, it has been widely assumed that increases in the minimum wage will increase women’s earnings relative to men’s earnings. The reasoning behind this theory is relatively straightforward: Women are more likely to have minimum wage jobs than men, and therefore are more likely to benefit from increases in the minimum wage. There is some evidence that such gender segregation is still the case—seeing as 59% of minimum wage workers are women (Economic Policy Institute 2021). Surprisingly, there has been relatively little research on this topic since the late 1990s. This dearth of research may in part be due to the fact the federal minimum wage has not changed in nominal terms in the United States since 2009. As a result, the theory on the effects of the minimum wage on the gender wage gap has gone largely unchallenged in recent years. Since that time, however, much has changed. In particular, the United States has experienced an unprecedented number of female college graduates—such that more women are enrolling in and graduating from college than men (Parker 2021). An increase in the number of female graduates, of course, should also mean fewer women working for minimum wage—and thus one would expect fewer women to be directly affected by increases in the minimum wage. While it is true that many women work at minimum wage level jobs, it is less than clear that the number of women who work for minimum wage jobs are sufficient to have a statistically significant impact on women’s earnings in general. There is good reason to be wary: A recent revisiting of the research on this topic has called into question the extent of the effects of the minimum wage on the gender wage gap, finding that the minimum wage has a much smaller effect on the gender wage gap than was previously thought (Autor, Manning, and Smith 2016; hereafter ‘Autor et al’). All of this undermines the longstanding theory that increases in the minimum wage predominately affect women’s earnings. Of course, the question of the gender wage gap in general is the most discussed topic in feminine economics. A plethora of solutions have been offered as to how to reduce the gender wage gap, most notably by Blau and Kahn (2017). Having considered all of these, however, all have been forced to acknowledge that a sizeable amount of the gender wage gap cannot be explained by any single factor (Blau and Kahn 2017). The number of unobservable characteristics—including sex discrimination—which are difficult to control for in a standard regression, make the task of determining which factors most affect the gender wage gap. While the gender wage gap in general receives a considerable bit of attention, the question of the effect of the minimum wage in particular on the gender wage gap has gone overlooked. Thus, the hope of this paper—at least in part—is to fill a void in the literature, and to reopen a case which, since the late 1990s, has largely gone cold, particularly in the United States.
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Authors: Urena, Roberto
Periodical (Full): Elon University
Issue: 1
Volume: 33
Pages: 1-10
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Gender, Poverty and Welfare
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