Heterogeneity in the US gender wage gap

Abstract As a measure of gender inequality, the gender wage gap has come to play an important role both in academic research and the public debate. In 2016, the majority of full-time employed women in the United States earned significantly less than comparable men. The extent to which women were affected by gender inequality in earnings, however, depended greatly on socio-economic characteristics, such as marital status or educational attainment. In this paper, we analyse data from the 2016 American Community Survey using a high-dimensional wage regression and applying double lasso to quantify heterogeneity in the gender wage gap. We find that the wage gap varied substantially across women and that the magnitude of the gap varied primarily by marital status, having children at home, race, occupation, industry, and educational attainment. These insights are helpful in designing policies that can reduce discrimination and unequal pay more effectively.