The Role of Job Mobility and the Gender Composition of Jobs in Wage Growth

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 6. Occupational Segregation by Gender

Abstract

This paper examines how differently women’s and men’s job stay or movement are rewarded in 6 patterned settings such as stay in male jobs or female jobs, movement within male jobs or female jobs, and movement toward male jobs or female jobs; this is done through analysis of personnel data of a regional grocery store chain between 1992 and 1997. The longitudinal analysis shows that movers attained a steeper wage growth than stayers, but women did not gain lower growth rates than men. In view of the gender composition of jobs, movement toward male jobs was compensated at the highest rate, whereas movement toward female jobs showed the lowest salary growth. If women and men used the same routes, no differentiated salary growth was seen between them in most cases. This means that the gender pay gap in this firm was mainly generated by the mixture of job mobility at the individual level and the gender composition at the job level. However, women unexpectedly earned steeper salary growths than men when they moved toward male jobs, and this result was statistically significant. Its meaning is discussed in term of salary.

Author

• Youngjoon Bae, University of Massachusetts at Amherst