In Search of Dynamism: Gender Inequality in Changing Geographically Bound Occupation and Industry Labor Markets

Michael Schultz , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Theodore Mouw, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Progress in reducing the gender pay gap has slowed or even stalled. Three prominent explanations for the gender pay gap are interrelated: occupational sex segregation, the motherhood wage penalty, and the rise of overwork. A challenge for the literature is the lack of a methodological approach that allows researchers to test the relative importance of all three hypotheses in the same analysis. This paper begins to address this methodological challenge by modeling the movement of men and women between pairs of occupation-industry jobs using a conditional logit. We test the effects of the motherhood penalty and overwork hypotheses on the between occupation-industry job gender pay gap. This method allows for the inclusion of a rich set of characteristics of the origin and possible destination jobs in geographically-bound occupation and industry labor markets, including changes in size, gender composition, local economic conditions, and several measures of friendliness to women and mothers.

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 Presented in Session 115. Gender and Labor Markets