Gender and pay: wage gap shrinks.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Citings - Brief article

In January, President Barack Obama announced rules requiring companies with over 100 employees to report data on their gender pay practices--part of a plan to equalize male and female pay. A new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, conducted by two Cornell economists, delves into the latest data on, and provisional explanations for, such pay differentials.

It finds the measured gap has shrunk considerably: Female wages were roughly 64 percent of male wages in 1980, but that figure had grown to 82 percent by 2010. The gap narrowed more in lower wage percentiles than the top one, leading the authors to conclude that "developments in the labor market for executives and highly skilled workers especially favored men."

Because of the huge gains in higher education and work experience for women since 1980, the share of the wage gap that can be...