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Author: Stock, Wendy
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Stock, Wendy
Gender Disparities in STEM Majors and Occupations: The Role of Early Skill Profiles
Presented: New Orleans LA, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2023
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: American Economic Association
Keyword(s): Gender Differences; Occupational Segregation; Skills; STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics); Wage Gap

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper aims to analyze the factors underlying underrepresentation of women in certain STEM fields. Although there has been substantial male-female wage convergence over time, there remains a persistent gap among college graduates that has been shown to be attributable, in part, to males and females choosing different college majors and occupations. Majors in applied STEM fields, such as computer science and engineering, are among the highest paid and are also those in which the representation of women is 20% or lower. Occupation and industry segregation was recently found by Cortes and Pan (2018) to constitute the largest portion of the explained component of the gender wage gap in 2010.

Using the NLSY79 and NLSY97 longitudinal datasets, this paper documents the adolescent skill (di)convergence by gender over the last four decades in terms of math, verbal, science, mechanical, and social skills and estimate machine learning models to identify the skills, high school course-taking and family background characteristics that are most predictive of one's educational attainment, choice of college major and occupation. I distinguish among non-STEM, pure-STEM and applied-STEM majors, as the pattern of female entry into pure-STEM and applied-STEM categories has been quite different. A nonparametric decomposition to empirically assess the relative importance of different factors is also performed. The results show that with men and women converging on math, administrative, science, and mechanical skills among the lower quintiles, the younger cohort displays less effect of skill gaps on major and occupation segregation. Although mechanical skills are found by the literature to constitute mainly the low-skilled workers' human capital, this study finds that conditional on having a four-year college degree, the level of one's mechanical skills is the most predictive factor of whether one chooses the applied-STEM fields, the most lucrative of all fields within this non/pure/applied-STEM taxonomy.

Bibliography Citation
Stock, Wendy. "Gender Disparities in STEM Majors and Occupations: The Role of Early Skill Profiles." Presented: New Orleans LA, American Economic Association Annual Meeting, January 2023.