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How long do early career decisions follow women? The impact of industry and firm size history on the gender and motherhood wage gaps

January 2018

Working Paper Number:

CES-18-05

Abstract

We add to the gender wage gap literature by considering how characteristics of past employers are correlated with current wages and whether differences between the work histories of men and women are related to the persistent gender wage gap. Our hypothesis is that women have spent less time over the course of their careers in higher paying industries and have less job- and industry-specific human capital and that these characteristics are correlated with male-female earnings differences. Additionally, we expect that difference in the work histories between women with children and childless women might help explain the observed motherhood wage gap. We use unique administrative employer history data to conduct a standard decomposition exercise to determine the impact of differences in observable job history characteristics on the gender and motherhood wage gaps. We find that industry work history has two opposing effects on both these wage gaps. The distribution of work experience across industries contributes to increasing the wage gaps, but the share of experience spent in the industry sector of the current job works to decrease earnings differences.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
economist, earnings, employee, employ, employed, labor, job, tenure, workplace, discrimination, woman, wage regressions, worker, industry wages, wage gap, occupation, wage differences, labor statistics, clerical, earn, earner, career, women earnings

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Standard Industrial Classification, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Social Security Administration, Center for Economic Studies, Financial, Insurance and Real Estate Industries, Current Population Survey, Longitudinal Business Database, Employer Identification Numbers, Survey of Income and Program Participation, North American Industry Classification System, Business Register, Detailed Earnings Records

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