Essays on Gender and the Labor Market

Abstract

Despite decades of convergence, men and women's outcomes in the labor market remain highly unequal. This dissertation studies different aspects of gender inequality in the labor market, and policies that some firms have implemented that affect disparities between their male and female workers. I focus on tenure track academics in US research universities---a setting I argue generalizes in important respects to the broader high-skill, white-collar workforce, and which allows me to study individual outcomes in depth. I use newly-collected panel data, following faculty in four subjects---economics, political science, sociology, and accounting---from roughly five hundred departments across several decades, linked to their earnings at public universities and research output in top journals.

In chapter 1, I measure how female managers affect gender disparities in their workplaces. Using the timing of transitions between department chairs, I find female chairs reduce gender gaps in publications and tenure for assistant professors, shrink the gender pay gap for faculty by a third, and raise the number of incoming female graduate students by ten percent.

In chapter 2, co-authored with Leah Boustan, we study correlations between economics departments' characteristics like field concentrations and the prevalence of female faculty, and the relative performance of male and female graduates in their job placements and early careers. We conduct in-depth interviews with faculty and alumni from five departments, and synthesize their responses to make recommendations for departments seeking to improve gender equity among their graduates.

In chapter 3, I study the impacts of policies that extend faculty tenure clocks following childbirth or adoption. Recent research on top economics programs finds that gender-neutral policies benefit men while hurting women's odds of earning tenure. Using the same difference-in-differences empirical approach and the same set of institutions as this prior work, but focusing on accounting, political science, and sociology departments, I find policy impacts that are more favorable to women. Subgroup analysis shows effects for women are more positive, and for men less so, in departments with more senior female faculty or for individuals working under female department chairs.