Gender gap in wage returns to job tenure and experience

AbstactWe present empirical evidence on gender disparities in wage returns to job tenure and experience. We find that the overall wage return on an extra year of labor market experience is lower for women than men. A decomposition analysis shows that the wage return to job tenure is substantially lower for women than men, and that the wage return to experience is higher for women than men. These gender differences are robust to various estimation procedures and are especially pronounced for more educated workers. We hypothesize that these observed gender disparities in wage returns are driven by the fact that women are less attached to their jobs than men. We present some supportive evidence for our hypothesis, namely, that women are more likely to quit their jobs, receive substantially fewer hours of company provided training, and a much higher fraction of women expect to not work at age 35 due to family related reasons.