The Gender Gap: Looking at the Entire Distribution

Abstract

We propose a new method of estimating wage differences among individuals from different populations, which is based on looking at the distribution of fixed effects from a wage regression. We use this method to compare males’ and females’ wage distribution at different levels of education and at different ages. In most cases, unobserved, time-constant factors increase the wage of males, compared to that of females, by a constant share. But this is not true when looking at the tails of the distribution. We also discuss the advantages of our method. JEL: J71, J31