Explaining the gender pay gap among doctoral graduates: analyses of the German labour market

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that female doctoral graduates earn less than male doctoral graduates; however, there has been little research on the determinants of this gender pay gap. This paper investigates the determinants of the gender pay gap among doctoral graduates in Germany. By relying on human capital theory, traditional gender roles and beliefs, and previous empirical findings, I examine gender differences in doctoral and occupational characteristics as potential determinants of the gender pay gap. I use data from a representative German panel study of the 2014 doctoral graduation cohort. Regression analyses on the logarithmic gross monthly earnings reveal that female graduates earn 30.4% less than male graduates five years after graduation. This gender pay gap is driven by a substantive wage premium for male doctoral graduates outside academia. Important determinants of the overall gender pay gap are doctoral subjects, professional experience after graduation, industries, management positions, and, above all, working hours. However, the considered determinants only partially explain the gender pay gap, as it remains substantial and statistically significant. The paper enhances the research on gender inequalities in post-doctoral careers and offers new insights into the determinants of the gender pay gap among doctoral graduates.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral graduates
• gender pay gap
• earnings
• gender inequality
• Germany

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Acknowledgements

I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal, Christiane Gross, and Fine Cordua for helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript. I am grateful to the participants of the following conferences for their comments on earlier versions of the paper: 14th Conference of the Society for Higher Education Research (GfHf) in Magdeburg (DE) 2019, 7th Conference of the Society for Empirical Educational Research (GEBF) in Cologne (DE) 2019, and 2nd Forum on Higher Education and the Labour Market (HELM) in Hanover (DE) 2019. Further thanks go to the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) for both collecting and providing the data and to the Faculty of Human Sciences at the University of Würzburg for funding the editing of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For practical reasons, the exclusion of three additional subgroups was necessary: graduates whose formal type of doctoral training (45) or final grade (10) were unclear and graduates from two industries with particularly low case numbers (food and hospitality services: 6; other economic occupations: 18).

2 The test indicated a x² distance of 2935.49 with 1,732 degrees of freedom and a p-value of .000.

3 I checked the distributions of the observed and imputed data and found that they are similarly distributed, which indicates a good fit of the imputation model to the observed data. In addition, the results are robust compared to complete case analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under grant 433155285; Faculty of Human Sciences at the University of Würzburg under grant OH 10/2019/III.18.

Notes on contributors

Lea Goldan

Lea Goldan is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Faculty of Human Sciences and a research assistant at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology, both at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Her focus is on research in higher education, labour market outcomes, and social inequalities, with special interest in the professional success of doctoral graduates in Germany. In her research, she collaborates with the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW).