Running head: TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 1

Trends in and Contributors to the Gender Wage Gap

Joshua Chiu

Virginia Commonwealth University

Author Note

This paper was prepared for GSWS 201, Section 701.

TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 2

Nearly two decades into the 21st century, the gender wage gap between men and women

persists. At the macroscopic level, there continues to be a 20 percent gap in the wages earned by

women employed in full-time employment (Miller, 2016). Since feminism advocates rights to

women equal to those enjoyed by men, this issue naturally extends to the workplace where there

is continuing advocacy for equal wages between the genders. Since gender is largely irrelevant to

occupational suitability in the vast majority of cases, the continuing wide gender wage gap is

both puzzling and worrying. Miller (2016) points out that trends in convergence between full-

time year-round male and female salaries have slowed to a snail’s pace since the early 2000s.

Ultimately, while the gender wage gap has narrowed significantly, this trend has slowed, in part

due to the continuing occupational segregation and differences in work hours, which stem from

uneven distribution of unpaid labor such as household labor and childcare, as well as the

continued contributions from unexplained factors that continue to perplex economists which

might partly derive from forms of discrimination.

In order to evaluate the trends in the convergence of the gender wage gap, Mandel and

Semyonov (2014) analyzed statistical data from two sources, the Integrated Public Use

Microdata Series and the American Community Survey, both of which had extensive sampling

data drawn from the U.S. Census. The data show that the gender wage differential in 1970

was .657, which means that average men made about two-thirds more money than the average

woman, or that the average woman made about 60% of what the average man made. By 2010,

this difference had shrunk to .356: the average man made just about a third more than the

average woman, or that on average women earned 74% of what men earned. According to Miller

(2016), by 2016 the gap had narrowed to women making on average 80% of what men earned. In

short, the success of the movement to eliminate the gender wage gap has been very substantial,

but at this instant it is unsuccessful in the sense that the gap, though being halved, still exists.

There is still a large gap to close, and the problem is enormously complex in the sense that there

are myriad relevant determinants of the wage. According to Mandel and Semyonov (2014),

much of the narrowing of the gender wage gap can be attributed to positive changes in various
TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 3

wage determinants among women, including educational attainment, work experience and work

hours. These trends were accompanied by increase in the ‘return-on-investment’ associated with

both educational attainment and work experience - meaning that the economy was increasingly

shifting towards ‘white-collar’ knowledge-based occupations such as computer technology, and

away from blue-collar occupations where men have traditionally dominated, which would be

expected to benefit women in the long run (Blau and Khan, 2007).

According to Mandel and Semyonov (2014), educational attainment no longer

contributes significantly to the gender wage gap. In fact, according to Blau and Khan (2007), at

the college level women now number over half of graduates. This is corroborated by Mandel and

Semyonov (2014) who posit that human capital resources are actually now a mitigating factor of

the gender wage gap; rather than increasing the gap, they help to close it. Blau and Khan (2007)

calculate that female advantages in education reduce the gender wage gap by about 6.7%. On the

other hand, according to Blau and Khan (2007), work experience, another important determinant

of wage, continues to be unevenly distributed between the genders: a full 3.5 year gap in full-

time work experience with the advantage going to men, which accounts by their reckoning for

11% of the wage gap. The work experience gap is explained by a variety of factors, such as

traditional division of labor in the family, the uneven household labor burden and the decrease in

productivity this might induce in workplace settings. Additionally, there seems to be an

anticipation of a discontinuous or inconsistent career by both women and their employers, which

means there is less investment in market-oriented education or on-the-job training. Firms may be

reluctant to undertake more in-depth training because they are worried about getting a return on

their investment (Blau and Khan, 2007).

However, the elephant in the room concern the two main bottlenecks apparent in the

gender wage gap: paid labor supply and occupational segregation. Certainly there have been

massive strides in increasing women’s working hours, and their entry into higher-wage,

traditionally male-dominated occupations. However, a significant gap in both of those fields

remains, and due to the shrinking of other contributors to the gender wage gap, these two
TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 4

remaining hurdles have taken on the spotlight. According to Mandel and Semyonov (2014), men

have decreased their working hours from 1970 to 2010, and women have increased their working

hours from 33.8 to 36.4. This is not without several caveats, however. There remains a high

variance in the working hours of women compared to men: about a third of women worked less

than 40 hours a week, while less than 10% of men did so. In the intervening 40 years, while the

work hours gap has shrunk, the remaining gap has increased its importance. According to

statistical models correlating various attributes with wage, in 1970 the working hours gap only

accounted for 4% of the gender wage gap, but it increased to 20% by 1990 and one-third by

2010. This means that the number of hours worked has become increasingly correlated to overall

wages on a macroeconomic scale. This is exacerbated by the increasing cost of overtime work,

which is much more common among men than among women Mandel and Semyonov (2014) -

and which, additionally, is more common in the private sector than in the public sector, due to

more regulated work conditions in the latter. For example, in the public arena on a per weekly

basis, men averaged 3.6 more hours per week than women, while in the private sector men

averaged 5.1 more hours per week than women.

The second major impediment to narrowing the gender wage gap, identified by both

Mandel and Semyonov (2014) and Blau and Khan (2007), is the continuing occupation

segregation between men and women, especially as it pertains to high risk high wage jobs - such

as the concentration of men in the oil industry. Blau and Khan (2007) cite occupational and

industry category segregation combined accounting for 49.3% of the remaining wage gap.

Mandel and Semyonov (2014) cite gender occupational segregation as contributing to 25% of the

wage gap in the public sector, and 10% of the wage gap in the private sector. Occupational

segregation has consistently accounted for about 11-13% of the overall gender wage gap

according to Mandel and Semyonov (2014), although its absolute amount has decreased

concurrent with the shrinking overall gender wage gap. Men’s wage advantages over women

within specific occupations still exist, for sure, but have been shrinking, with a fall of 86%

witnessed from 1970 to 2010. Blau and Khan confirm (2007) this: generally, within the same
TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 5

narrowly-defined occupational categories and companies, wage differences between men and

women “tend to be small” - and are therefore not the primary contributors to the remaining

gender wage gap.

Overall, when taken together, Mandel and Semyonov (2014) assert that working hours

and occupational segregation make up “almost all the explained portion of the gender wage gap

in 2010.” However, according to both Mandel and Semyonov (2014) and Blau and Khan (2007),

a significant “unexplained” portion of the gender wage gap remains that is due to either

unattributed factors or hidden discrimination. Mandel and Semyonov said this unexplained

portion was about 58% gender wage gap, while Blau and Khan said this unexplained portion was

about 41% of the wage gap. Therefore, about half of the remaining gender wage gap is due to

some sort of discrimination or other unquantified factor, with another quarter each due to gaps in

the work hours and occupational segregation. Although this simplifies the analysis somewhat,

other factors such as the differences in educational attainment actually favor women, and

demographic factors such as race, or unionization status all play remarkably minor roles (2.4%

and 3.5%, respectively, according to Blau and Khan (2007)).

Low hanging fruit in narrowing the gender wage gap has largely already been achieved,

as discrimination has decreased enormously as a contributor to the gender wage gap. However,

the combination of data showing that the wage gap grows with age (Miller, 2016), and the lower

labor force participation rate of women who are parents (Jayson 2013), suggest that after

childbirth many women opt to work less or not at all, and are at the same time compensated less

if they do work. This dovetails with the continued de facto gendered occupational segregation -

differences in educational choices which lead to differences in occupational options. This might

be due to choices to enter professions with lower barriers to entry, mirroring the more

fragmented and unstable employment and dearth of on-the-job training that women have access

to.

If we draw on aggregate data provided by Jayson (2013), the overall relationship between

work hours, gender and household labor, an underlying explanation becomes apparent.
TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 6

According to Jayson (2013), Pew Research Center data suggest that men and women spent about

an equal amount of time on work if paid work and unpaid household labor were combined,

around 45 hours. Overall labor was also equal for dual-earner couples. However, for parents in

particular, there continued to be a major disparity in gender distribution of household labor:

women spent almost 18 hours a week on household labor, compared to just under 10 for men.

This disparity extends to time spent on childcare as well. Naturally, since the total paid and

unpaid labor hours between the genders is about equal, this means that women have significantly

fewer paid work hours, especially once they become parents, because they shift their time

towards unpaid household labor and childcare.

Mandel and Semyonov (2014) echo this: “These challenges, however, emanate from the

same source: namely, the gendered division of labor. Gender occupational segregation preserves

the domestic division of labor, creating a barrier to overtime work, a crucial requirement for

cracking the glass ceiling and reducing occupational segregation.” Therefore, a positive future

direction in the reduction of the gender wage gap will rely on continued advocacy to both fight

against outright discrimination, which accounts for roughly half of the remaining gender wage

gap, but which is also more subtle than it was in the past, as well as identifying what other

factors might contribute to the “unexplained” portion of the gender wage gap. Other goals such

as reducing the paid work hours gap and the occupational segregation, bolstering long-term

career prospects for women through job training, and women entering higher barrier of entry

occupations, will all rely in part on a more egalitarian and equitable reallocation of household

work and childcare duties between men and women.

TRENDS IN AND CONTRIBUTORS TO THE GENDER WAGE GAP 7

References

Blau, F., & Kahn, L. (2007). The Gender Wage Gap: Have Women Gone as Far as They Can?

Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(1), 7-23. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4166284

Jayson, S. (2013). Men vs. women: How much time spent on kids, job, chores? USA Today.

Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/14/men-women-

work-time/1983271/

Mandel, H. & Semyonov, M. (2014). Gender Wage Gap and Employment Sector: Sources of

Earnings Disparities in the United States, 1970–2010. Demography, 51(5), 1597-1618.

doi:10.1007/s13524-014-0320-y

Miller, K. (2016). The Simple Truth about the Gender Wage Gap (Fall 2016). AAUW. Retrieved

from http://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-wage-gap/