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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