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Title: Gender and Wage Attainment at Entry into the Labor Market: Cohort and Racial Comparisons
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Fan, Pi-Ling |
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Gender and Wage Attainment at Entry into the Labor Market: Cohort and Racial Comparisons Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1996 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Ethnic Differences; Family Structure; Gender Differences; Hispanics; Human Capital; Income Dynamics/Shocks; Job Aspirations; Labor Market Demographics; Mobility, Social; Racial Differences; Wage Dynamics; Wage Gap Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The goal of this research is to achieve a better understanding of gender differences in the process of wage attainment at entry into the U.S. labor force. I define labor market entry as entry into the first full-time civilian job held after first leaving full-time education in order to exclude short-term and partial attachments to the labor force during the schooling process. I examine the gender gap in wages at labor market entry and evaluate alternative explanations of the wage gap. I consider the effects of gender differences in worker characteristics, including human capital, family structure, work and family aspirations, and the role of employing organizations and social networks in allocating women and men to different jobs within the occupational and industrial structure. Based on data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience, I find that the gender gap in wages declined 10.3 percent among whites and 2.3 percent among blacks over the period o f a little more than a decade separating the two cohorts. The analysis indicates that reduced gender differences in occupational aspiration, family structure, and human capital all contributed to reduction of the gender gap in wages for blacks and whites, whereas changes in the external influences of employing organizations and network processes on occupational and industrial placement widened the gender gap in wages. I also document that the ratio of female-to-male wages at labor market entry was 85 percent for whites, 85 percent for blacks, and 88 percent for Hispanics for the NLSY. I find that gender differences in human capital, occupational aspirations, and occupational and industrial placement all play an important role in explanation of the gender differences in wages at labor market entry. Differences in the relative importance of these alternative explanatory mechanisms across racial and ethnic groups provide insight into the kinds of changes needed to reduce the gender gap in wages. |
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Bibliography Citation
Fan, Pi-Ling. Gender and Wage Attainment at Entry into the Labor Market: Cohort and Racial Comparisons. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1996. |