Orazio Attanasio, Peter Levell, Hamish Low, Virginia Sánchez Marcos
In spite of the substantial decline in gender differences in labour market outcomes observed over the last few decades in developed countries, substantial gender gaps remain. As discussed in Blau and Kahn (2017), gender gaps in terms of conventional human capital variables are now small, particularly among highly educated individuals. However, a gender pay gap persists, and is more pronounced at the top of the wage distribution.
The dynamics of the gender wage gap during the early career
Empirical evidence of a widening overall gender gap after several years in the labour market has been found in the UK (Manning and Swafield 2008) and the US (Goldin 2014, Erosa et al. 2016). Interestingly, similar findings are reported among a more homogenous sub-sample of the population, such as university graduates, MBAs from top business schools, or associate lawyers (Goldin 2014, Goldin et al. 2017, Azmat and Ferrer 2017). Bertrand et al. (2010) document a male earnings advantage reaching almost 60 log points a decade after MBA completion from a top US business school. Francesconi and Parey (2018) study gender gaps in university and labour market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation in Germany. They estimate a gender gap of five to ten log points, even after including a large set of controls. Albrecht et al. (2018) track, for 20 years, individuals who completed a university degree in business or economics in Sweden, and show that although women and men had essentially identical wages and earnings at the start of their careers, their career paths diverge substantially as they age.