Inequality Among Women: Is There Variety?

The expansion of women’s education and employment has transformed labor markets across advanced democracies. Yet comparatively little is known about how educational wage inequality among women has evolved across countries and over time. This article examines wage gaps between college- and non-college-educated women in the United States, Germany, and Sweden between 1991 and 2020. We propose a framework of women’s inequality regimes that captures the interplay between labor market and family policies in shaping women’s economic opportunities and constraints. Drawing on data from the Luxembourg Income Study and using unconditional quantile regression, we analyze both the magnitude of educational wage inequality and the extent to which it is driven by women at the top or bottom of the wage distribution. We find that educational wage inequality is largest in the United States and smallest in Sweden, while Germany occupies an intermediate position but exhibits the most pronounced increase over time. This increase is driven by both rising wages among highly educated women at the top of the wage distribution and the growing concentration of low-educated women at the bottom. Our findings indicate that the institutions facilitating women’s labor market integration also shape women’s inequality regimes, with important implications for social stratification and household inequality.