Speaker
Alexandra Killewald
Professor of Sociology
University of Michigan
Abstract
The US gender pay gap has narrowed substantially since 1980, but more slowly since 1990. We ask how these trends have been shaped by the combination of changes in gender pay gaps upon labor market entry and changes in how gender pay inequalities evolve across the life course. We find that young women in later cohorts consistently gained ground in pay relative to their male peers. Later cohorts of women launched their careers from more advantageous starting points, and these gains in starting points suffice to explain the entire narrowing of the cross-sectional gender pay gap 1980–2020. By contrast, changes across cohorts in the gender gap in wage growth with age were mixed and offsetting. Together, our results help shed light on both progress toward pay parity and its stall. Furthermore, they suggest that women are unlikely to achieve pay parity if future gains come only from narrowing the wage gap in young adulthood: even if young women were to reach pay parity with young men, the aggregate gender pay gap will persist as long as rates of pay growth with age do not converge.