The Earnings of Female and Male Middle Managers: A Canadian Case Study

Earnings functions are estimated for a sample of 428 male and 256 female middle managers in one Canadian firm. For the full sample, human capital, behavioral, and organizational factors all have significant impacts on earnings differences, as does the gender coefficient, which accounts for a 10 percent differential against females. The female-male earnings differences are also decomposed into their coefficients, attributes, and interaction components, revealing that the differences are adequately represented in the full-sample regression by the coefficient on gender. A static model, in which returns are independent of attributes, appears to be an adequate representation of the relevant earnings function.