Importing Equality? The Effects of Increased Competition on the Gender Wage Gap
34 Pages Posted: 11 Aug 1999
Date Written: March 1999
Abstract
It is now well documented that the gender wage gap declined substantially in the 1980s, despite rising overall wage inequality. While Blau and Kahn (JoLE 1997) attribute much of this improvement to gains in women's relative labor market experience and other observable characteristics, a substantial part of the decline in the gender wage gap remains unexplained and may be due to reduced discrimination against women in the labor market. This paper tests the hypothesis (based on Becker 1957) that increased globalization in the 1980s forced employers to reduce costly discrimination against women and thus accounted for part of the "unexplained" improvement in the gender pay gap.
To test this hypothesis, we calculate the change in the residual gender wage gap across industries (as well as cities) over time using CPS data from 1977 - 1994, and test the correlation between this measure and changes in import shares. The wage data are further broken down by the type of market structure in an industry, i.e., whether the industry is concentrated or competitive. Since concentrated industries face little competitive pressure to reduce discrimination, an increase in competition from increased trade should lead to a reduction in the residual gender wage gap. We use a difference-in-differences approach to compare the change in the residual gender wage gap in concentrated versus unconcentrated sectors, using the latter as a control for changes in the gender wage gap that are unrelated to competitive pressures. The findings indicate that increased competition through trade did contribute to the narrowing of the gender wage gap, suggesting that, at least in this sense, trade may benefit women relative to men.
JEL Classification: J7, J13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Foreign Competition, Market Power and Wage Inequality: Theory and Evidence
By George J. Borjas and Valerie A. Ramey
-
Market Forces and Sex Discrimination
By Judith K. Hellerstein, David Neumark, ...
-
Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination
-
Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination
-
Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination
-
Coding Geographic Areas Across Census Years: Creating Consistent Definitions of Metropolitan Areas
By David A. Jaeger, Sarah E. Turner, ...
-
An International Comparison of Employment Adjustment to Exchange Rate Fluctuations