This working paper discusses the various explanations put forward to explain gender gaps in career outcomes for highly-educated workers in the US corporate and financial sectors. The authors of the paper (Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz) looked at the careers of MBAs who graduated from a top US business school between 1990 and 2006 in order to understand how career dynamics differ by gender. Although male and female MBAs started with almost identical incomes at the outset of their careers, the study found that women’s earnings significantly declined over time compared to their male counterparts. The authors identified three main reasons for the large and rising gender gap in earnings: Differences in training prior to MBA graduation (women tend to take fewer finance courses); Differences in career interruptions; Differences in weekly hours.
These three determinants can explain the bulk of gender differences in earnings across the years following MBA completion. The presence of children is the main contributor to the lesser job experience, greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs. Disparities in the productive characteristics of male and female MBAs are small, but the pecuniary penalties from shorter hours and any job discontinuity are enormous for MBAs. The researchers stress that active discrimination is unlikely to have played much of a role in the pay gap but the influence of gender roles in determining career paths is still very much a factor.
This NBER paper (No. 14681) is available to current London Business School staff, students and faculty from the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) working papers database available from the A-Z list of library databases via Portal.
Picture from Creative Commons: Flickr: la fabbra
Recent Comments