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The Park Place Economist

Abstract

The gender wage gap has recently gained a significant amount of attention in the literature. The gender wage gap is the difference between male and female earnings for doing the same work. Additionally, one can often find the gender wage gap expressed as a percentage of male earnings. Currently, there is a debate over what portion of the gender wage gap is due to obvious workplace discrimination. Some argue that women’s career choices are the driving force behind the gender wage gap (Ehrenberg et al, 1993). However, there are many factors that could contribute to the gender wage gap such as age, educational attainment, hours worked, and occupational distributions. The motivation behind this research is to establish whether there are differences in the gender wage gap based on gender distribution within an occupation after controlling for a number of other important determinants of the gender wage gap.

After controlling for human capital related determinants of wages, this study will determine the impact of gender distribution within an occupation on earnings. Section 2 of this paper will look at existing literature on the subject and discuss its relevance to the study at hand. Section 3 will explain the theoretical framework that lead to the hypothesis. Then, Section 4 will describe the data along with its reliability and relevance to the topic at hand. Upon observing the data, Sections 5 and 6 will illustrate the descriptive statistics and regression model used in this paper. After depicting the means to which this topic was observed, Section 7 will convey the results of both the descriptive statistics and regression models. Finally, Section 8 will provide some concluding remarks.

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