It is a disgrace for the American Economic Association to promote such demagoguery! See also my blog post here on this demagoguery of a gender pay gap.
What or how much does workforce participation have to do with this "gender equality"?
What is wrong with the chart below?
- Data stops with the 1990s. Why not more recent data?
- Education, workforce participation and age do not determine wage outcomes as much as other factors! It is foremost the choice of jobs, changing jobs, relocating for jobs, prior job experiences, job promotions, career ambitions and so on!
The authors of this paper use again the old, false, and worn out trope of child rearing (why not elder care etc.)! Although, the US abandoned the draft in 1973, still predominantly men choose military service which may or may not negatively affect/impact their lifetime income as well.
The first author Richard Blundell is a highly recognized, older economist, if I am not mistaken. His accumulated lifetime citation count is 109,830, which is quite good! He started publishing research articles in the late 1970s.
"The gender wage gap narrowed dramatically from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, with women's wages converging toward those of men across all income levels. Then progress stalled, and despite continued advances in women's education and workforce participation over the subsequent quarter century, the gap has persisted. [???] ..."
From the abstract:
"We estimate the full distribution of life cycle wages for cohorts of men and women in the United States using a quantile selection model to account for systematic differences in employment by gender and education group.
Although common within-group time effects [???] are shown to be a key driver of labor market inequalities across gender, important additional differences by birth cohort emerge with more recent cohorts of women delaying child rearing [???] and, by implication, the onset of child penalties in wages.
These cross-cohort differences help account for the stalling of progress in gender wage gaps over the past quarter century."
Labour market inequality and the changing life cycle profile of male and female wages (original news release from 4/13/2023 plus working paper)
Labor Market Inequality and the Changing Life Cycle Profile of Male and Female Wages (no public access)
Figure 5 from the authors’ paper shows their estimates broken down by educational attainment.
