On October 18th, Ana Rute Cardoso (ICS, ULisboa) will present at ISEG the study "Will the Gender Pay Gap Decline as Women Enter Well-paying Occupations?".
Free admission.
Abstract:
The earnings potential of a field of study is increasingly relevant for the funding of higher education institutions by the government and the choice of degree by students. There is a widespread belief that if young females choose fields of study that are currently well-paid, such as STEM, the gender pay gap will narrow once they enter the labor market. We evaluate the impact of rising feminization on wages over the life cycle across fields of study, while accounting for the changing job skill requirements. We address the following questions: How does the rate of skill change impact the earnings of higher education graduates? Does a field of study become less valued in the labor market once its share of females increases? The first step in our analysis follows Deming and Noray's (2020) to quantify the impact of changing skill requirements on wages. We subsequently introduce an additional mechanism, the gender composition of the working population. We use rich longitudinal data on the population of workers and firms in the private sector in Portugal. We exploit exogenous variation in the share of females in an occupation relying on data on the population of higher education candidates and enrolled students. [results soon]