Volume 10, Number 2 (Spring) 1975
Polachek, Solomon William. 1975. "Potential Biases in Measuring Male-Female Discrimination." Journal of Human Resources 10(2):205-229.
By addressing the problem of life-cycle division of labor within the family, this study considers the question of the effect of family characteristics on both male and female earnings capacities. The paper illustrates both theoretically and empirically that being married and having children have opposite effects on the wage rates of husbands and wives, and further that these diverging wage patterns are perpetuated over the length of the marriage. Neglecting the fact that family characteristics have opposite effects on male and female wage structures leads to biases in the computation of the male-female discrimination coefficient.
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The author has benefited from conversations with John Akin, Gary Becker, Arthur Benavie, Lee Benham, Russell Hill, Donald Keesing, Jacob Mincer, and Peter Schmidt. He wishes to express thanks to two anonymous referees for their numerous comments while at the same time taking responsibility for any errors that might remain. William Daland and Judy Poole of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences of the University of North Carolina provided competent computational assistance. In part, this research was financed by the Ford Foundation; however, their views need not coincide with those expressed in this paper.
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