Essays on Gender and Labor Economics

Abstract

This dissertation explores the role federal policy can play in rectifying gender inequities in labor market outcomes. The first chapter shows that federal anti-discrimination policy helped to increase women’s representation in medical education, contributing to a stark decline in occupational segregation in the second half of the 20th century. The second chapter shows that equal pay policy in the 1960s led to marked increases in women’s earnings, staving off an increase in the gender pay gap, especially for lower-earning women. The third chapter makes a theoretical contribution to our understanding of why firms offer parental leave, an amenity at the heart of discussions surrounding the differential labor market impact of childbirth on women and men. In Chapter 1, I consider the role of federal policy in increasing women’s access to medical education. In the 1960s, women comprised under 10% of all medical students, resulting in a lopsided gender imbalance in the medical profession. I find that a host of federal anti-discrimination policies, implemented in the late 1960s and early 1970s, increased women’s enrollment by successfully applying pressure to curb sex discrimination in admissions though the threat of revoking federal funding. In addition, this policy amplified the impact of a massive expansion in enrollment through Health Manpower policy on women by allowing them to capture a higher fraction of newly created seats. In Chapter 2, Martha J. Bailey, Bryan A. Stuart and I consider the success of two landmark statutes—the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts—in targeting the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. At the beginning of the 1960s, the gender earnings ratio at the median had dipped below 60%, and the stability of this statistic over the next decade suggested that policy had not done much to alleviate this gap. We revisit this conclusion using two separate causal designs. In our first design, we find that women’s wages grew more quickly after 1964 in states that did not have pre-existing equal pay laws, where we would expect the effects of federal policy to be the strongest. Then, in our second design, we find larger wage growth for women working in jobs with a higher wage gap, where pay discrimination is more likely to be present. In Chapter 3, I consider the question of why firms voluntarily offer parental leave as a benefit to employees. The federal government requires covered employers to provide only 12 weeks of job protected unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act, but many employers provide additional wage replacement and leave time beyond this statutory requirement. I consider a setting where workers and firms search over a collection of submarkets characterized by the posted wage and likelihood of finding an employment match. Firms are homogenous but are able to choose whether or not they offer a job with parental leave. Workers differ from one another in the amount of time they would spend out of the labor market on leave after childbirth. I find that firms will only offer leave when the duration of expected leave is below a particular threshold. This threshold is given at the point where the benefit of leave, given by hiring savings, is higher than the cost of retaining a worker on leave net of pass through to the employee.