Gap in many dimensions: Application to gender

Abstract

We extend the conventional approach to gender gaps, which typically focuses on single outcomes such as wages or earnings, to multiple outcomes e.g. wages jointly with leisure, health. This changes the view of overall gender differences. Drawing on the literature on welfare and inequality measurement, we motivate a concrete class of multivariate evaluation functions and show that this is the only class with some desired properties. We examine its sensitivity to parts of the distribution and to the valuations of attributes. We exploit decomposability by gender, single dimensions, interdependence and counterfactual effects, to guide policy decisions and evaluation. The joint gender gap in wages and leisure in the US is shown for the period 2005–2022. It differs from the wage gap due to several negative effects of leisure: a slowing down of the downward trend, larger differences at the bottom of the distribution than at the top, and an increase in within-gender inequality for women. The contribution of the leisure gap to the joint gap has increased over time.