The increase in female labor force participation is well documented, but what’s interesting is that while women are almost half the employed population, they’re relatively rare among top earners.pic.twitter.com/7nLiJV7W5K
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Marianne Bertrand’s talk was great, made even more great because she’s got an excellent speaking style interjected with slight humor and magnetism. The talk mainly focused on the stubbornness of the gender gap in earnings.pic.twitter.com/eioT0lMdii
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This appears partly when you examine the gender gap within occupation. Notice how for the wealthiest jobs, the gender gap gets larger.pic.twitter.com/ZGVPy7Dz32
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Could this be due to differences in biological factors affecting productivity? As an example, she noted the literature on greater risk aversion for women; and the connection between risk and high paying jobs.pic.twitter.com/SYxUAtpgZo
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She cited an interesting study showing worse relative performance for women when pay schedules flips from piece rate to tournament.pic.twitter.com/BHIfgtvEH3
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But outside in the real world, the focus has tended to be on women’s demand for flexibility and this was pretty interesting. Notice the divergence in average earnings for Booth MBA students as time since graduation grows. What’s going on? It doesn’t start out this way.pic.twitter.com/A8VbxzsLAF
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This won’t surprise most on EconTwitter, but notice that as time passed for this group, the women were working less and less per week. I’m not at all comfortable with controlling for hours worked in a wage regression, given its jointly determined, but nevertheless she did.pic.twitter.com/MMf6NEMZE9
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And when she does, the gender gap shrinks a lot - from 50% to more like 10%.
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Now if these small differences in hours worked are happening in occupations with high elasticities of income to yours, then this can be a practically big effect.pic.twitter.com/KVp2aIb6DC
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So why are the women slowing down? She calls this issue a career disruption, and jobs that penalize ones “inflexible”. Women value flexibility potentially because the burden of childcare still falls on women.pic.twitter.com/pTOqkaDuY9
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The child penalty is estimated in two recent papers using registration data in Sweden and Denmark with event studies. Pretty dramatic. Women salaries plummet after a child, men’s don’t, and women never catch back up.pic.twitter.com/zMAav6KPl6
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In Denmark, the gender gap is driven entirely driving the gap, whereas it once was just one of the stories. But the others have diminished practically to nothing at least in Denmark.pic.twitter.com/V5U4hZCA6J
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So she showed also evidence that women face unusual marriage market pressures wherein displaying preferences penalizes them using a clever experiment.pic.twitter.com/eggbGx6YMY
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Next she reviewed the literature on work family amenities, but the story here was complex, for me, because parental time and other investments have grown for the educated. She also mentioned gender neutral childcare policies and noted these have harmed women.pic.twitter.com/QYe5mtnrpY
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Overall, really useful walk through Bertrand’s views and what she thinks is important in this literature.
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This is the best thread I’ve ever read on Twitter. The best use of my online time. Thanks a lot. I only wish we had more like it.
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Glad you liked it! It was a great talk. If you have a chance to hear her speak, you should. She seems super cool, funny, interesting, confidence, intelligent. But as a speaker, and only that, she’s really good.
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How do wages compare for professional women who never have children?
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Good question. That wasn’t shown in the studies.
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Is there an open link to the paper?
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No she actually spoke about a lot of papers. Sometimes a slide I link to lists a paper by the names of the authors, so you might could dig it up, but there isn’t one paper for her whole keynote unfortunately.
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