Gender Wage Gap in Expectations and Realizations

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which the gender wage gap is anticipated by workers'expectations. Data collected among second year students of Bocconi University conveyinformation about their wage expectations. Detailed controls allow a clean matching with asample of Bocconi graduates providing information about their actual wages. The evidenceshows that the gender gap implied by students' expectations one year after graduation isconsistent with the gender gap implied by the earnings of their elder counterparts. There isinstead a misperception of the gender gap later in the career after graduation becausestudents expect the gender gap to be roughly constant while realizations indicate anincreasing gap with experience, particularly for the relatively less skilled worker. There is alsoevidence that the gender gap at the beginning of a career is particularly high in the mostrecent cohorts and lower in the previous ones. Finally, our results suggest that the careers offemales are characterized by "glass ceilings" in particular at high skill levels, and by "stickyfloors" at the opposite end of the skill spectrum.

Keywords: gender wage gap, expectations

JEL Classification: J3, J7