Unions, Occupational Career Change, and Gender Inequality: Using Current Population Survey Panel Data to Assess Police Wage Change

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111231165518
• Author: Xiaoshuang Iris Luo,Cyrus Schleifer
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2023, Vol. 26(4) 573–604

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111231165518

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Unions, Occupational Career

Change, and Gender

Inequality: Using Current

Population Survey Panel Data

to Assess Police Wage Change

Xiaoshuang Iris Luo

1

and Cyrus Schleifer

2



Abstract

A large body of literature describes the occupational gender wage gap at the national labor

market level as well as in specif‌ic occupations. Yet, among those studies of within-

occupational inequality, few have focused on how occupational career change affects

gender wage inequality. With an increasing number of female workers entering into the

policelaborforceaswellasthehighturnoverrate in the police sector, it is important to

explore wage changes in this highly unionized and hyper-masculine occupation. Using two-

wavepaneldatafromtheCurrentPopulationSurveyMergedOutgoingRotationGroup

(CPS-MORG) from 1979 to 2016, this study examines how change in occupational career

along with change in union membership may lead to different wage rewards or penalties for

policemenandpolicewomen.Ourf‌indings reveal that individuals experience a large

increase in wages when joining the police occupation, and this wage bonus is greater for

women than for men. Furthermore, individuals joining the police as well as a union see a

wage bonus, but wage loss when leaving the police and a union. Overall, police men have a

larger wage loss than police women when leaving the police force and losing union

membership. Policy implications of these f‌indings are discussed.

1

University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

2

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

Corresponding Author:

Xiaoshuang Iris Luo, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California Irvine, 2340 Social

Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697-7080, USA.

Email: xiaosh.luo@uci.edu

Keywords

gender wage inequality, police, occupational career, union

Introduction

Gender inequality in earnings is a long-standing concern within sociology and has been

well documented over the past several decades (Auspurg et al., 2017;Blau & Kahn,

2006;England et al., 2007;Juhn et al., 1993;Mandel & Semyonov, 2014;Misra &

Strader, 2013;Moore, 2017). A recent statistic shows that women’s median annual

earnings were about 80.5% of men’s for full-time, year-round workers in 2016 (Institute

for Women’s Policy Research, 2017). Women have continuously earned substantially

less pay on average than their male counterparts, and this gender wage inequality shows

different characteristics between and within occupations. Mouw and Kalleberg (2010)

have shown that the overall gender gap in pay is largely the result of between-

occupational inequality, where female-dominated jobs and occupations pay less than

male-dominated jobs (England et al., 1994). Within-occupational inequality, instead, is

more diversif‌ied. In almost all of the most commonly held occupations, full-time

employed working women earn less than men, but the degree of disadvantage varies

greatly by types of occupation (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2010a), and

becoming a member of certain occupations is associated with a greater wage penalty

(Mouw & Kalleberg, 2010).

For our purpose here, we are interested in wage inequality among police off‌icers, for

several reasons. First, as a hyper-masculine public sector occupation (Garcia, 2003;

Rabe-Hemp 2009;Schulze, 2011), police off‌icers, both men and women, experience

wage advantages over income-earning individuals in the general population, but the

general gender wage gap also exists in policing, in which female police earn sub-

stantially less than their male counterparts (Luo et al., 2019). Second, policing is a

highly unionized occupation, and this has led to several occupational advantages

(DeCarlo & Jenkins, 2015). Police unions, however, appear to produce a gendered

effect on income among police off‌icers, with male off‌icers receiving a larger union

bonus than female off‌icers (Luo et al., 2019). Third, police work is precarious and

includes threats of violence, injury, or even death, marital conf‌lict, and psychosomatic

disorders (Singleton & Teahan, 1978). These charateristics lead to police jobs having a

high turnover rate (DeLey, 1984;Wilson et al., 2010) despite of the comparatively high

earnings. However, little research explores how the process of people joining or leaving

the police could affect gender wage inequality in this occupation.

To f‌ill in the research gap, our current study, using data from the Current Population

Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-MORG), focuses on how changing

occupational career combined with union membership change shapes gender wage in-

equality among police. More specif‌ically, we aim to evaluate the gender differences in

wages for individuals who change or do not change their occupational caree r and union

status (i.e., becoming, leaving, or remaining in the police occupation/a union member) by

574 Police Quarterly 26(4)

employing change models and the panel component of the CPS data. We also implement

two-step Heckman Selection Models to account for sample selection. With this two-wave

CPS panel data, we are able to observe how the gender dynamics evolve w ithin this male

dominated occupation (Garcia, 2003). While this approach has been used to study

American clergy (Schleifer & Miller, 2017)andnurses(Schu macher & Hirsch, 1997), this

will be a novel approach to understanding wage changes as well as gender earnings

inequality within the criminal justice system in the U.S.

Background

Gender Inequality in the Labor Market

Supply-Side and Demand-Side Approaches. Researchers have proposed several theories

to explain the persistent gender inequality in pay. Overall, there are two main

approaches –supply-side approaches and demand-side approaches (e.g.: Kaufman,

2010). First, the supply-side explanations focus on the nature of individuals’supplying

labor (Kaufman, 2010), including human capital th eory, neoclassic al economic

explanations, work effort, etc. In this perspective, individual worker’s character-

istics, personal attributes and endowments, or productivity and other individual

voluntary investments would accumulate internally. Second, the demand-side

explanations emphasize the nature of workplace demanding labor, including but

not limited to employer discrimination and occupational sex segregation. It reveals

gender pay inequality by mainly stressing the behavior of employers, the biased

hiring and recruiting process against applicants of different genders, and the

segregation of feminizing occupations (Kmec, 2005).

From the perspective of supply-side, human capital theory has been widely used to

explore gender wage inequality. It argues that organizations or labor market create

opportunities that differ in rewards through divisions of labor, and workers are sorted

into unequally rewarded positions based on their own human capital (Huffman, 2013).

To be in a better position in the labor force, workers need to sacrif‌ice present earnings to

invest in themselves through training and skill improvement for future earnings payoff

(Kaufman, 2010). Women, especially when they are married or become mothers, tend

to spend more time out of the labor force to raise children and take care of the family

due to gendered family roles, resulting in overall lower levels of work experience.

Women are also thought to be less productive at work than men, and they focus more on

the family (Hersch & Stratton, 2000). The differences in the investment in human

capital, such as education, work experience, job tenure, time out of the labor market,

current work status, and other characteristics explain the wage disparity between men

and women (Gough & Noonan, 2013).

For demand-side approaches, the gendered segregation of occupa tions has played a

signif‌icant role in the persistence of gender pay gaps (Cohen & Huffman, 2003;Rosenfeld

&Kalleberg,1991). Over 90% of the gender wage ga pi n different U.S. general population

samples is associated with sex composition of jobs (Tomaskovic-Devey & Skaggs, 2002).

Luo and Schleifer 575