Gender wage gap in the USA

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to analyses the gender wage gap in the USA and how this gap changes if the education level, the family status, the occupations and industry categories are taken into account. Collecting data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and especially from the IPUMS USA for the year 2019 I try to figure out if there are differences in the distribution of men and women regarding the above-mentioned characteristics mainly. Then I observe the mean wage of the two genders and finally I create a regression model that examines the characteristics that affect the wage, and they are correlated with the gender. The results from the analysis show that when I control for the education level, the gender wage gap increases. This is because, women increase their investment on human capital factors – they are more educated than men. Significantly, the wage declines in regards to the occupations, and it declines ever more if there is an interaction between occupations and industry. This is due to the fact that women prefer to work at low paying occupations and they are more likely to be part-time workers.