Abstract
Despite remarkable progress toward gender equality over the past half-century, the stalled convergence in the gender wage gap after the mid-1990s remains a puzzle. This study provides new insights into this puzzle by conducting the first large-scale investigation of the uneven impact of the rise of programming in the labor market for men and women since the mid-1990s. We argue that the increasing reliance on programming has favored men’s economic status relative to women’s and therefore may help explain the slow convergence of the gender wage gap. We differentiate between two effects: (1) the composition effect, wherein men experience a greater employment growth in programming-intensive occupations relative to women, and (2) the price effect, wherein the wage returns to programming intensity increase more for men than women. Our empirical analysis documents a strong relationship between the rise of programming and the slow convergence of the gender wage gap among college graduates. Counterfactual simulations indicate that the absence of the composition and price effects would have reduced the gender wage gap over the past two decades by an additional 14.70 percent. These findings call attention to the role gender institutions play in shaping the uneven labor market impact of technological change.
Highlights
Despite remarkable progress toward gender equality over the past half-century, the stalled convergence in the gender wage gap after the mid-1990s remains a puzzle
This study started with the proposition that whereas the pre–mid-1990s waves of computerization have favored the productivity of office jobs, which women tend to be employed in, the changes in computer technology after the mid-1990s, which have led to an increasing reliance on programming in the labor market, may have favored men over women and have impeded the movement toward gender equality
This proposition is supported by our empirical investigation, in which we documented a strong relationship between the rise of programming-intensive occupations and the stalled convergence in the gender wage gap among those with a college degree in the recent two decades
Summary
Despite remarkable progress toward gender equality over the past half-century, the stalled convergence in the gender wage gap after the mid-1990s remains a puzzle. In step 3, we estimate the gender-specific net wage returns to programming intensity across two decades, controlling for a large set of demographic, educational, employment, and occupational characteristics.
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