Are Women's Wage Gains Men's Losses? A Distributional Test

Abstract

* Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, V6T 1Z1, and Department of Economics, CRDE, CIRANO, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, PQ H3C 3J7; Lemieux is also affiliated with the NBER. We thank Paul Beaudry, Richard Blundell, Richard Freeman, and Robert Haveman for helpful comments and discussions. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and from FCAR, Quebec. 1 The gender wage ratio and the 90/50 wage ratio for men are calculated from the Current Population Survey (CPS) data provided by EPI ^http://www.epinet.org/&. The 1980’s trends in the gender gap emerged from average real increases of 0.5 percent per year in women’s median wages and average real declines of 1 percent per year in men’s median wages.