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Title: The Gender Wage Gap, Human Capital, and Monopsony: Historical Evidence from High School Teachers

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: I build a new dataset from archival sources that contains rich information on high school teachers in Tennessee in the early twentieth century. I use the data to measure the gender wage gap and test hypotheses about its underlying causes. Micro-level data on wages, detailed background characteristics, and job characteristics are extremely rare for this period, as women increasingly entered white-collar employment. High school teachers are particularly useful to study in this context because the job requirements and curricula were defined at the state level and, as such, the jobs were similar for both genders. In addition, high school teacher is one of the few occupations that employed large numbers of both men and women, facilitating close comparisons and measurement of the gender gap. I find a large gender wage gap even after controlling for detailed background information on the teachers education, experience, subjects taught, and other personal observables and local fixed effects. Variables such as university attended and teaching experience can account for little of the gender gap, whereas promotion to principal status accounts for a sizable share of the gap. Variation in the remaining gap across locations is consistent with the hypothesis that monopsony power by county school boards, rooted in social norms about womens work, also contributed to the gender gap.

Url: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/michaelmoody/files/2015/10/Moody_1015.pdf

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Authors: Moody, Michael Q

Publisher: Vanderbilt University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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