ABSTRACT

For the past two decades, scholars of gender inequality in the labor market have sought to understand why occupations with more female workers tend to pay less. This question addresses a robust finding about occupational sex composition and wages: studies based on different samples, units of analysis, and statistical techniques almost always find significant wage effects of occupational sex composition even after accounting for a wide range of personal attributes and occupational characteristics. The evidence of lower wages in “female occupations” (i.e., occupations that are disproportionately female) may reflect subtle gender discrimination. Instead of wage discrimination against female workers, gender discrimination may take the form of wage discrimination against female work.