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49 Indus. & Lab. Rel. Rev. 105 (1995-1996)
Interindustry Wage Differentials and the Gender Wage Gap

handle is hein.journals/ialrr49 and id is 107 raw text is: INTERINDUSTRY WAGE DIFFERENTIALS AND THE GENDER WAGE GAP JUDITH FIELDS and EDWARD N. WOLFF* Using data from the March 1988 Current Population Survey, the authors find that the wages of female workers differ significantly by industry, even when the analysis controls for workers' productivity- related characteristics. Although these interindustry wage differentials are at least as large as men's and are highly correlated with them as well, there are statistically significant differences between the two. Of the overall gender wage gap (the average female worker earns about 65% as much as the average male worker), 12-22% can be explained by differ- ences between the patterns of interindustry wage differentials of men and women and 15-19% by differences in the distribution of male and female workers across industries. Thus, the combined industry effects explain about one-third of the overall gender wage gap. S everal recent studies have demon- strated the existence of interindustry wage differentials that cannot be explained either by productivity-related characteris- tics of workers or by industry characteristics such as unionization or concentration (see, for example, Dickens and Katz 1987a; Krueger and Summers 1988). These pat- terns have been shown to persist over time, and they have been found not only in the United States but in other countries as well. Several theories have been offered to ex- plain this anomaly, from the wage contours model of Dunlop (1957) to more recent *Judith Fields is Assistant Professor of Economics, Lehman College of City University of New York, and Edward N. Wolff is Professor of Economics, New York University. The authors thank the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University and the Jerome Levy Economics Institute at Bard College for financial support. models of efficiency wages and rent sharing (for example, Katz 1986; Thaler 1989). As far as we are aware, all the work to date has considered only male wages or wages of the total employed work force. In the present study, we examine the pattern of interindustry wage differentials separately for women and men in the United States on the basis of data from the 1988 Current Population Survey (CPS). There are five questions of interest. First, do these differentials exist among female work- The text contains details of the procedures by which the authors extracted the various March 1988 CPS samples used in this study. These samples were analyzed using the IBM mainframe version of SAS. Researchers interested in obtaining copies of the data, computer programs, and codebooks used to generate the results should contact Edward N. Wolff at the Department of Economics, New York Univer- sity, 269 Mercer Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10003. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 49, No. 1 (October 1995). © by Cornell University. 0019-7939/95/4901 $01.00

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