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Title: Was it Discrimination or the Market? Female Employment and the Wage Gap

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2007

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Abstract: This paper quantitatively tests how much of the post-WWII evolution in employment and average wages by gender can be explained by a model where changing labor demand requirements are the driving forces. I argue that a big fraction of the original female employment and wage gaps in mid-century, and the subsequent shrinking of both gaps, are explained by labor reallocation from brawn-intensive to brain-intensive jobs favoring women's comparative advantages in brain over brawn. I analyze the effects of an exogenous "brain-biased" technical change, increasing the relative productivity of brain-intensive to brawn-intensive production processes, on aggregate employment and wage gap trends. Initial results suggest the mechanism to be able to explain 37 to 67 percent of the rise in married female labor force participation, about 89 percent of the rise in single female labor force participation and about 53 to 62 percent of the closing wage gap, with an initially slower growth rate in average female to male wages due to selection bias. Moreover, the model, similar to the data, generates fairly steady married and single men's labor force participation over time.

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Authors: Rendall, Michelle

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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