The Gender Wage Gap a Product of Misogyny, Not Just Gender Norms

Abstract

I construct a novel measure of misogyny using Google Trends data on searches that include derogatory terms for women. I show that misogyny is an economically meaningful and statistically significant predictor of the wage gap, and use it to test the predictions of two influential labor market discrimination models. I find that the gender wage gap is inconsistent with the Becker model of taste-based discrimination, but that it fits Black’s search model of discrimination which allows for discrimination from even a small group of misogynists to result in a wage gap.

Keywords: Gender wage gap, wage discrimination, gender norms, misogyny