 When Are ‘Female’ Occupations Paying More?Stepan Jurajda and Heike Harmgart () No 985, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) Abstract: We compare the importance of occupational gender segregation for the gender wage gap in East and West Germany in 1995 using a sample of social-security wage records of full-time workers. East Germany, which features a somewhat higher degree of occupational segregation, has a gender wage gap on the order of one fifth of the West German gap. Segregation is not related to the West German wage gap, but in East Germany, wages of both men and women are higher in predominantly female occupations. East German female employees apparently have better observable and unobservable characteristics than their male colleagues. These findings are in contrast to a large U.S. literature, but are consistent with the imposition of high wage levels in East Germany at the outset of reforms and the selection of only high-skill women into employment. Finally, conditioning on unobservable labor quality differences using the longitudinal dimension of the data, there is a negligible impact of segregation in both parts of Germany. Keywords: gender wage gap; occupational segregation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published - published in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2007, 35 (1), 170-187 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp985 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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