Occupational Characteristics and Fertility in the US: Changes Over the Last Two Decades
(w/ Nicholas Mark)
The Countervailing Implication of the Second Gender Revolution Among College Graduates in the US
(Wonjeong Jeong, under review)
The decline of gender gaps in the US labor market has stagnated, especially among the highly educated. This paper focuses on family formation, which here is defined as one being a parent or in a marriage. The family has been identified as an increasingly important factor in sustaining the gender earnings gap. At the same time, in line with the Second Gender Revolution thesis, highly educated women have displayed the slowest rates of decline in marriage and fertility, rendering them the most likely to be situated within familial contexts.
This paper bridges these two lines of trend and literature and assesses the extent to which college graduates' (especially women's) changes in the family are associated with the stagnation of the gender employment, earnings, and hourly wages gap from the early 1980s to the late 2010s. Using a decomposition of change, I show that had the family formation patterns of college-educated women and men remained unchanged since the 1980s, the gender employment gap would have shown the most pronounced narrowing among the three outcomes, with an additional 14% reduction. Although the overall association of family change with the gender earnings and wages gaps is more modest (at 7% and 1%, respectively), a closer examination of the detailed decomposition calls for a more nuanced interpretation.
Results demonstrate 1) the importance of the underlying demographic trends on the gender gaps in the labor market, 2) different implications on various outcomes, and 3) the usefulness of the detailed decomposition analyses.