Gender Differences in Job Requirements: Change Within Careers and Across Cohorts

Abstract

We examine differences in jobs held by men and women based on a measure not used before, the standard human resources measures of “knowledge, skills, and abilities” generated by job analyses. While there is an abundance of evidence on gender disparities in pay, we know much less in detail about differences in the work men and women perform and especially how these differences have changed over time. We use nationally representative data for two cohorts of college graduates, one entering the post-college workforce in 1994 and another in 2009, and we follow them for the first 10 years of their careers. We find that women generally held jobs with lower requirements relative to men. The gender gap in job requirements grew over the course of individuals' careers for the first cohort (1994–2003) but declined sharply for the second (2009–2018). We also find that among the second cohort, women received a wage premium for social skills that was greater than what men received.