McDonald, Judith A., and Robert J. Thornton. 2007. “Do New Male and Female College Graduates Receive Unequal Pay?” Journal of Human Resources 42(1): 32–48.
We analyze the female-male gap in starting-salary offers for new college graduates using data from the annual surveys of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), unique (and proprietary) data that have not previously been used for this purpose. A major advantage of working with a data set on salaries for new college graduates is that we can remove the possible influence of gender differences in experience, promotions, job changes, and other factors on the salary gap. We find that as much as 95 percent of the overall gender gap in starting-salary offers can be explained by differences in college majors selected.
Judith McDonald is an associate professor and Robert Thornton is a professor of economics at Lehigh University. The authors thank Gauri Karve for research assistance. They also thank NACE for access to its restricted-use salary surveys. Any errors remain the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors would be happy to provide guidance to other researchers seeking these data; please contact Judith A. McDonald, Department of Economics, Lehigh University, 621 Taylor Street, Bethlehem, PA 18015-3117, email: djm0@lehigh.edu.