Gender gap in reservation wages and the choice of education field

ABSTRACT

I examine the gap in reservation wages between men and women who enter the labour market for the first time and link it to the choice of education field by gender. Using data from 2006 to 2015 Labour Force Survey for Poland, I show that men and women with the same education value their qualifications differently, which points to behavioural differences by gender. The gender difference in returns to education fields is found to be the single most important predictor of the gender gap in reservation wages. Women educated in mathematics, IT and physics are found to report higher reservation wages than other women and there is no difference in pay expectations between them and men. The results contribute to the discussion on the importance of a higher presence of women in STEM fields as a way of achieving greater gender equality in the labour markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender wage gap
• reservation wages
• sex segregation in education
• gender inequality

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• J31
• J24

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For a comprehensive review of research on the gender wage gap and its sources see e.g. Blau and Kahn (2017), Matysiak and Cukrowska-Torzewska (2021).

² Data for more recent years are not used due to the change in education fields coding.

³ Individuals are asked about monthly pay rather than hourly wage / annual earnings because monthly pay is the most common way of reporting earnings in Poland.

⁴ The „life sciences” are dropped from the analysis due to the insufficient number of observations that belong to this education field.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland grant [2018/31/B/HS4/01562].