It is well known that the occupational distribution for males and females differ significantly in Britain. The implications of this difference are explored in a joint model of earnings and occupation choice. The role and relative importance of inter and intra occupational effects are evaluated as contributors to the male/female wage differential. The model explicitly incorporates the endogeneity of occupation choice and examines the role of sample selection in occupation specific wage equations. The main conclusions following from the econometric results are that the rile of inter-occupation gender wage differences dwarf that of intra-occupation differences. Thus by far the most important contributor to the overall gap in male/female wages is the unjustified within occupation component i.e., that arising from the unequal treatment of male and female productivity characteristics within a given occupation. The results also suggest a wide variance in occupation specific wage differentials, ranging from virtually zero in teaching to around 30 percent in business. Taken together, the results imply that anti-discrimination policies aimed at decreasing the male/female wage differential might be most effective if focused on within occupation adjustments. Thus affirmative action programs which aim at change the occupational distribution of female labour would seem unlikely to succeed. Finally, the role of non-random sampling in estimating occupation specific wage equations is found to be important for males, though less so for females.
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Paper provided by Queen's University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
803.
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