Gender earnings inequality in the service and manufacturing industries in the U.S

Michael Greene and Emily Hoffnar

Feminist Economics, 1995, vol. 1, issue 3, 82-95

Abstract: This paper compares earnings inequality between women and men in a growing sector of the U.S. economy - the service sector, and a shrinking sector - manufacturing. We examine the hypothesis that deindustrialization will reduce inequality, and find that the absolute magnitude of the gender earnings gap is, in fact, smaller in the service sector. Decomposition analysis is used to partition the gender earnings gap into three parts: (1) earnings differences due to differences in mean characteristics - such as education and experience; (2) earnings differences due to preferential treatment of men; and (3) earnings differences due to disadvantageous treatment of women. The latter two constitute estimates of gender discrimination. The results of this study suggest that, ceteris paribus, deirndustrialization will likely reduce the gender gap in hourly earnings. However, this will come at the cost of lower earnings for both males and females, with the drop in earnings being particularly large for males. While deindustrialization is predicted to reduce the absolute magnitude of male-female earnings inequality, evidence suggests that gender discrimination will persist - discrimination explains about 60 percent of the gender wage gap in both the service and the manufacturing sectors.

Keywords: Discrimination; gender; earnings; deindustrialization; decomposition; race (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/714042250 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:femeco:v:1:y:1995:i:3:p:82-95

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/714042250

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().