Gender differences in the earnings produced by a middle range education: The case of Canadian 'colleges'

•The gender earnings gap within a sample of recent community college graduates rose during the 1990s and remained than its late 1980s level.•The earnings gap began increasing in the first five years after graduation.•The rise in the earnings gap is associated with shifts in occupational demand, in particular, the shift caused by the tech-boom.•A major contributor to the earnings gap is gender differences in hours of paid work.

In this paper we use data on consecutive cohorts of recent graduates from community colleges or community college-like institutions to address the following questions about the gender earnings gap: i) What was the trend in the gender earnings gap for these recent graduates? ii) What role in the observed trends in the gender earnings gap was played by occupational demand? iii) How and to what extent did the domestic division of labour contribute to the gender earnings gap in this young sample? We find that the gap fell then rose, that occupational demand played a role in these shifts, and that the domestic division of labour did indeed contribute to the gap in this young sample. Furthermore, our results point to a process of cumulation of factors that increase the earnings gap which has both substantive and methodological implications.