Wage growth across fields of study among young college graduates: is there a gender gap?

Abstract

We use the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society data set to learn about gender gaps during the early career of college graduates in Europe. We document substantial heterogeneity across fields of education in the gender wage gap at the entrance to the labour market. We find that the gap evolves against women over the five years after graduation in Social Science and in Economics, Business, and Law. Finally, we estimate a significant female wage growth penalty after we control for observable characteristics only within the Economics, Business, and Law category. Within this field, we estimate a female annual wage growth penalty of 1.1 percentage points among individuals who remained childless and 2.5 percentage points among individuals who became parents. A small fraction of the wage growth gap disappears after we control for variables capturing individual differences in job mobility or in labour market attachment during the early career. (JEL codes: J16, J24, J31)