9
working full time for more than 30 hours per week, and three years after graduation men and
women usually neither tend to be parents yet nor they have accumulate significant work experience.
A second factor found to be significant in many empirical studies on gender differences in pay even
at the beginning of a career is the choice of college majors (Eide 1994; Brown and Corcoran 1997;
Daymont and Andrisani 1984; Lin 2010). Female students tended to concentrate in areas with lower
pay, such as education, health and psychology, while male students dominated higher-paying fields
such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences.
Our data, however, documents large gender disparities in pay that persist even between individuals
who studied the same fields (Tab. 5), and even controlling for standardized test score (eduperf) does
not reduce significantly the unexplained pay disparity in our regression analysis.
The results of our regression analysis show that even controlling for a lot of variables whose effects
may be part of the explanation of the gender pay gap, the unexplained component remains
nevertheless high in each field of study.
Tab. 5 - Gender pay gap by college majors
|
College majors |
Explained pay gap |
Unexplained pay gap |
Raw pay gap % |
|
Total Empolyment__________________ |
_________27,03_________ |
_________72,98_________ |
________11,55________ |
|
1 Humanities____________________________ |
_________10,55_________ |
_________89,45_________ |
________8,86________ |
|
2 Economics, business and statistics_______ |
_________12,74_________ |
_________87,26_________ |
________9,25________ |
|
3 Political science and sociology___________ |
_________56,77_________ |
_________43,23_________ |
________8,95________ |
|
4 Sciences______________________________ |
__________1,83__________ |
_________98,17_________ |
________10,27________ |
|
5 Law____________________________ |
_________53,68_________ |
_________46,32_________ |
__________3,11__________ |
|
6 Engineering___________________________ |
_________16,40_________ |
_________83,60_________ |
________6,64________ |
|
7 Architecture_____________________________ |
_________13,98_________ |
_________86,02_________ |
________10,02________ |
|
8 Medicine____________________________ |
_________46,72_________ |
_________53,28_________ |
________16,13________ |
|
Empolyees_________________________ |
_________12,23_________ |
_________87,77_________ |
________11,05________ |
|
1 Humanities____________________________ |
_________23,14_________ |
_________76,86_________ |
________5,73________ |
|
2 Economics, business and statistics_______ |
_________7,99_________ |
_________92,01__________ |
_________8,88_________ |
|
3 Political science and sociology___________ |
___________4,01___________ |
_________95,99_________ |
_________7,85_________ |
|
4 Sciences______________________________ |
_________0,69_________ |
_________99,31__________ |
________9,54________ |
|
5 Law____________________________ |
_________58,35_________ |
_________41,65_________ |
________9,33________ |
|
6 Engineering___________________________ |
_________15,02_________ |
_________84,98_________ |
________5,84________ |
|
7 Architecture_____________________________ |
_________19,19_________ |
_________80,81__________ |
________11,44________ |
|
8 Medicine____________________________ |
_________52,12_________ |
_________47,88_________ |
________11,72________ |
Why a woman who acquires the same human capital endowment of a man and makes the same
career choices as a man does not receive the same reward?
In the Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) approach, discrimination is defined as the difference
between the observed gender pay ratio and the gender pay ratio that would prevail if men and
women were paid according to the same criteria (Grimshaw and Rubery 2002). As by definition