Gender, Wages, and Immigration

Is it really true, as some media reports have suggested, that young women now earn more money than young men? Heather Boushey says yes, but only because in the youngest cohort women are better-educated than men:

But young women are earning more than young men because young women are acquiring more skills than the men are. Good for them. But this doesn’t mean that they’re being treated the same way in the workplace. When you do the apples-to-apples comparison that the AAUW did, young women still earn less than comparably skilled men. What has changed is that there are more women with higher levels of education. Among women aged 22 to 30, a third (34 percent) have some college education and a third (35 percent) have a college degree or more. Among men in that age group, less than a third (30 percent) spent some time in college, and just over a quarter (28 percent) have a college degree. If one group (women) has more workers with more education, then they should outearn the other group. That’s what the Reach Advisors study shows—that because there are more young women with college degrees, women now outearn young men.

It’s also worth considering how much of this is transient. The construction field is a male-dominated one that pays people without college degrees fairly well. Currently, however, it’s disproportionately depressed as part of the recession. That’s different from a enduring shift like women’s higher educational attainment in my demographic cohort.