Women's Economic Progress and Inequality

Linda Wong ()

No 477, 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper explores links between women's economic progress and widening inter-industry wage differentials. Each phenomenon arises because of technological change that has favored young women's human capital, in what is called sex-biased technological change. Such technological change helps lower the costs of women of bringing their abilities to the market, enabling more of them to gravitate to the high-tech sector, shifting the relative skill supply. Our theory can simultaneously rationalize the facts on increasing female wages and their participation in the high-tech sector, wage premium favoring the high-tech sector, and female to male wage ratios. Our theory also predicts an amplification of the selection effect on gender difference in productivity in the high-tech sector. We use workers' skill indexes given by the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to determine technology sectors. Results based on state-level data indicate the elasticity of substitution between high and low-skill workers is around 2. We provide evidence in favor of sector participation and wage patterns predicted by our model. The allocative impact of sex-biased technological change is 8 to 10 times larger than the wage effect. The results are robust for all measures of patent innovation.

Keywords: sector choice; directed technological change; gender wage gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~lwong/bio/wep.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~lwong/bio/wep.pdf [302 Found]--> https://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~lwong/bio/wep.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed006:477

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().