Black, Dan A., Amelia M. Haviland, Seth G. Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor. 2008. “Gender Wage Disparities among the Highly Educated.” Journal of Human Resources 43(3): 630–659.
We examine gender wage disparities for four groups of college-educated women—black, Hispanic, Asian, and non-Hispanic white—using the National Survey of College Graduates. Raw log wage gaps, relative to non-Hispanic white male counterparts, generally exceed -0.30. Estimated gaps decline to between -0.08 and -0.19 in nonparametric analyses that (1) restrict attention to individuals who speak English at home and (2) match individuals on age, highest degree, and major. Among women with work experience comparable to men’s, these estimated gaps are smaller yet—between -0.004 and -0.13. Importantly, we find that inferences from familiar regression-based decompositions can be quite misleading.
Dan A. Black is a professor at the Harris School at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at NORC; Amelia M. Haviland is a statistician at RAND Corporation; Seth G. Sanders is a professor of economics at Duke University; and Lowell J. Taylor is a professor at the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NICHD, and thank seminar participants at the University of Chicago, University College London, London School of Economics, Florida Atlantic University, University of Michigan, Notre Dame, Texas A&M University, Yale University, and the annual meetings of the Population Association of America. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning January 2009 through December 2012 from Amelia M. Haviland, RAND Corporation, 201 North Craig Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, haviland@rand.org.