Most studies of the gender pay gap use cross-section earnings functions to apply a Oaxaca decomposition into the contributions of differences in characteristics and coefficients. But the accounts that these studies provide of the gender pay gap are often hard to relate to more informal stories told about the sources of women’s disadvantage in the labour market. In this paper we show how one can...

Women must work fifteen months and eight days to earn what men earn in a year" (Lesley, 1999). In a society where women are often single mothers who must support both themselves and children, why would they get paid less than men for doing the same job? When John F. Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which promised women "equal pay for equal work," women earned only 58 cents for every do...