Can the Gendered Sorting of Occupations Explain Wage Differentials across Educational Levels in the Us?

Varun Satish , Princeton University
Alicia Adsera, Princeton University
Federica Querin, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna

The persistence of gender earnings gaps, despite women having higher levels of education, runs in contrast to predictions from models of human capital accumulation. To address this, we ask whether men and women occupy different types of jobs even with the same education. This may account for gender differentials if women either sort or are discouraged from occupying jobs with characteristics that make them high paying. We are primarily interested in understanding the role of educational attainment in determining gendered occupational sorting. Recent studies highlight the importance of occupation and sector in perpetuating the gender wage gap, but their focus is mostly on the highly educated workers. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) along with O*NET occupation information, we focus on five dimensions of occupational characteristics that may reflect sorting by gender and education: contact with others, autonomy, leadership, machine-dependency, and time pressure. Preliminary results confirm gendered prevalence in these occupational characteristics, with women performing jobs with higher contact with others and less machine use. We document educational gradients in the wage returns to these characteristics. Results from Oaxaca-Binder decompositions highlight how our models explain gender differentials more for highly educated workers than for those with less education, underscoring the importance of further research specifically on workers who do not have a college degree.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 27. Flash session 1 Economics, Human Capital and Labour Markets