Understanding gender gap further

To better
understand the historical gender wage gap, we investigate the wages of Swedish
compositors circa 1900 using a rich dataset of matched employer-employee information
with national coverage. In line with previous findings, women earned about 70
percent of men’s wages on average. Individual and job characteristics explain
much of this shortfall. Firm characteristics or firm fixed effects on average
explain 17 percent of the gap, though the firm mattered more for the gender gap
in big cities than elsewhere. Sorting across firms is thus an important part of
understanding historical gender wage gaps. While most studies conclude that a
significant portion of the gender gap is unexplained, suggesting labor market discrimination,
this may result from a lack of information on the distribution of men and women
across firms.

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为更深入地探析历史上的性别工资差距，我们依托一套覆盖全国的丰富匹配雇主-雇员数据集，对约1900年瑞典印刷排字工的工资水平展开研究。与既往研究结论一致，女性平均工资约为男性的70%。个体与岗位特征可解释该差距的绝大部分。企业特征或企业固定效应平均可解释17%的工资差距，不过企业对性别工资差距的影响在大城市中显著强于其他地区。由此可见，员工在不同企业间的分选现象，是解析历史性别工资差距的关键一环。尽管多数研究认为性别工资差距的显著部分无法得到解释，进而指向劳动力市场存在歧视，但该结论或许源于对男女在企业间分布情况的信息缺失。