Ljubica Nedelkoska, research scientist at the Complexity Science Hub and senior research fellow at the Growth Lab (Harvard University) will present a talk on Friday, September 24 at 3pm.
If you would like to attend, please send an e-mail to office@csh.ac.at.
Title: Technological change and the gender pay gap
Abstract:
The gender pay gap in the United States has been closing since the 1980s, the same period in which the American economy computerized. We study whether this closing happened despite computerization, or because of it. To answer this, we study whether the closing of the pay gap mainly happened because of gender differences in the degree of labor reallocation between occupations, or because of gender differences in the transformation of the job tasks inside occupations. The latter would suggest a more straightforward technological explanation.
We also analyze the pre-computer technologies and job tasks in male and female jobs, and study whether these initial conditions contributed to the faster de-routinization of female-dominated jobs that we observe. We construct a new longitudinal dataset that makes such analysis possible. Using optical character recognition and natural language processing, we transformed the U.S. Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT, 1939 – 1991) into a database akin to, and comparable with its digital successor, O*NET (1998 – today). After creating a single occupational classification, we connected all DOT waves and decennial O*NET databases into a single dataset stretching over nine decades, and merged into this information from the U.S. Decennial Census on employment, wages, education, and other demographic and labor market characteristics.
This is joint work with Shreyas Gadgin Matha, James McNerney, Andre Assumpcao, Dario Diodato, and Frank Neffke.