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Graduate Degrees and the Gender Wage Gap over time
Sun, August 10, 12:00 to 1:00pm, East Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Floor: Ballroom Level/Gold, Grand Ballroom AAbstract
Recent work exploring the gender pay gap at the top of the wage distribution has uncovered three important patterns: first, the gender pay gap is particularly strong at the very top of the earnings distribution, and this is partially driving the persistent gender pay gap (Mandel and Rotman 2022; Quadlin, VanHeuvelen, and Ahearn 2023a). Secondly, though women are out educating men, women’s returns to education are lower across the wage distribution, and this is particularly acute at the very top (Mandel and Rotman 2021). Finally, gendered sorting into fields of study and advanced degrees not appear to drive this persistent wage gap among high earners (Quadlin et al. 2023a; Zheng and Weeden 2023). One conclusion of this line of literature appears to be that equalizing gender segregation in education is unlikely to solve gender segregation and gender wage gaps in the labor market (Quadlin et al. 2023a; Zheng and Weeden 2023). However, this claim is made without attention to or detailed exploration of field of study and field of study sorting among advanced degrees. In this paper, I contribute to this line of inquiry by first examining differential selection into graduate study then investigating gendered sorting at the advanced degree level as a possible explanation for the gender gap among the most educated. Using ACS and NSCG, I ask how differential selection into graduate school by gender has effected the gender wage gap across 4 cohorts. I then examine the effect of gendered sorting among specific advanced degrees and occupations on the gender wage gap across these cohorts. Taken together we see how changes in the gender wage gap among college graduates may have been differentially influenced by sorting at each of these levels as graduate education has expanded.