A Longitudinal Analysis of White Women's Wages

Abstract

According to human capital theory, women's work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth. We test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals, both past and prospective, part-time work experience, and working in "male" rather than in "female" jobs affect wages and wage growth for white women. We do this by estimating a wage change model for the years 1967-1979 for a national sample of white women. We find that wages drop immediately following withdrawals, but that this is followed by a rapid wage growth so that the net loss in wages from dropping out of the labor force is small. We further find that wage growth is not significantly lower in "female" than in "male" jobs, but that part-time work experience does not lead to significant wage growth, in either "male" or "female" jobs.