Type of Schooling and Sex Differences in Earnings in the Netherlands

Though men and women now achieve similar level of schooling, the types of fields they study still vary widely. Men are overrepresented in technical and economic fields, whereas women are overrepresented in socio-cultural and service fields. In this paper, we examine to what extent the type of field people study affects their earnings, and we try to determine to what extent prevailing differences in type - as opposed to amount - of schooling contribute to the sex difference in earnings. To answer these questions, we estimate standard human capital models of earnings using a large nationally representative sample of higher educated men and women in the Netherlands. We augment previous models by developing a multi-dimensional measure of educational attainment. We subsequently show that male types of tracing generally have higher earnings returns than female types, that the new schooling measures explain considerably more of the gender gap in earnings than standard measures, and that rates of return to specific types of training have a tendency to differ between men and women.