Gender, College Major, and Earnings

Abstract

Studies that examine the gap between women's and men's earnings and the gap in their returns to education have used a person's years of school completed as the measure of his or her education. It may be that these gaps are produced by what subject matters men and women study rather than by discrimination. This paper tests the effect of a person's major field in post-secondary education on his or her hourly wage to see if the content of what is learned in college, as opposed to the duration of the educational experience, can explain any of the gap between men's and women's earnings due directly to gender or any of the gap in returns to education. Data are taken from thie National Longitudinal Surveys of the Labor Market Experience of young women and men. It is found that the-direct effect of gender on the earnings of people with at least some college education is large, even net of a number of important control variables, and that controlling for major field of study reduces this gap only slightly. It is unexpectedly found that young women's returns to a year of post-secondary education are higher than young men's, although not much so and not enough to offset the negative effect of being female on earnings.