• AEA in the news
  • September 13, 2017

Explaining the gender wage gap

A 2010 study found that male MBA's earned substantially more than their female colleagues a decade into their respective careers.

Nyul/Bigstock

Vox featured a 2010 paper that appeared in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in a piece about the gender wage gap. The paper by Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz looked at how career earnings differed for male and female MBA graduates of a top US business school. They found that earnings were nearly identical at the outset of their careers, but that the wage gap widened considerably — reaching nearly 60 log points — after a decade. Vox also cited Goldin’s 2014 paper published in the American Economic Review about the convergence of the gender gap.