The Gender Wage Gap

Women earn 80 cents, on average, for every dollar a man earns. This lecture reviews a variety of potential explanations for this gender wage gap and the empirical support for each.

 

Recommended Readings

Goldin, Claudia. 2014. "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter." American Economic Review, 104 (4): 1091-1119.DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.4.1091 Or, for a less technical version with a similar argument see: Goldin, Claudia. 2015. How to Achieve Gender Equity in Pay. The Milken Institute Review Third Quarter: 24-33.

Hotchkiss, Julie L. and M. Melinda Pitts. 2005. “Female labour force intermittency and current earnings: switching regression model with unknown sample selection.”Applied Economics 37(5): 545-560.

Blau, Francine D. and Lawrence M. Kahn. 2017.The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations. Journal of Economic Literature 55(3): 789-865.

Denning, Jeffrey T., Brian A. Jacob, Lars J. Lefgren, and Christian vom Lehn. “The Return to Hours Worked within and across Occupations: Implications for the Gender Wage Gap.” ILR Review, (November 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939211045376.

Download course materials:

Course Years:

2023,
2022,
2019

Instructor

Angela K. Dills, Ph.D.

Gimelstob-Landry Distinguished Professor of Regional Economic Development
Western Carolina University