On Using Pareto Distributions for Measuring Top-Income Gender Disparities

Niels-Jakob Hansen, Karl Harmenberg, Erik Öberg and Hans Sievertsen

No 9-2019, Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics

Abstract: Atkinson et al. (2018) propose a measure of the glass ceiling exploiting that top incomes are approximately Pareto distributed. We clarify how this glass-ceiling coefficient describes the increasing scarcity of women further up in the income distribution and show how it relates to the top-income gender gap. If interpreting top income gender differences as caused by a female-specific income tax, the gender gap and glass ceiling coefficient measure its level and progressivity, respectively. Using Danish data on earnings, we show that the top gender gap and the glass-ceiling coefficient evolves across time, the life cycle, and educational groups.

Keywords: decomposition; gender gap; glass ceiling; summary statistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2019-09-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-gen
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Journal Article: Gender disparities in top earnings: measurement and facts for Denmark 1980-2013 (2021)
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