This paper examines the trends in the well-being of American women over the last 25 years, a time of significant changes in the relative economic status of women and in the labor market as a whole. A broad range of indicators are considered to capture changes in women's well-being in the family as well as in the labor market. For virtually all age and education groups, substantial evidence is obtained of rising gender equality in labor market outcomes, notably labor force participation, wages, and occupational distributions. Broad evidence is also found of greater gender parity within married couple families as the housework time of husbands increased relative to wives' and the relative wages of wives rose compared to their husbands'. However, parallel to the recent evidence of the declining labor market position of lower skilled men, there has been a similar deterioration in the economic status of less educated women, especially high school dropouts. Their labor force participation rates and wages have risen at a much slower pace than those of more highly educated women, while their incidence of single headship has increased much more rapidly. These findings for less educated women serve to underscore the widening gap between more and less skilled Americans of both sexes, as well as to emphasize its broad dimensions.
Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly- changing parental education levels determine children’s school enrollment to a greater degree than education policy interventions. A succession of international meetings has nevertheless adopted a litany of utopian international goals for universal school enrollment and gender parity in education based on the idea that a correct education policy backed by sufficient cash could achieve the goals in short order. The latest of these, the Millennium Development Goals, call for universal primary schooling and full gender parity by 2015. This work quantifies how long it has taken countries rich and poor to make the transition towards high enrollments and gender parity. There are three central lessons. First, there is a remarkable uniformity of experience in the rates of enrollment increases, a reality from which the various rounds of goals appear entirely detached. Second, many countries that have not raised enrollments fast enough to meet the goals have in fact raised enrollments extraordinarily rapidly by historical standards and deserve celebration rather than condemnation. The very few poor countries that have raised enrollment figures at the rates envisioned by the goals have done so in many cases by accepting dramatic declines in schooling quality, failing large numbers of students, or other practices that cast doubt on the sustainability or exportability of their techniques. Third, aid-supported education policies can help within limits, and their performance should be judged in the context of country-specific, historically-grounded goals. But a country’s broader development strategy outside the classroom matters much more than education policy.
While male high school graduates were more likely to enroll in college than their female counterparts three decades ago, this pattern reversed by the late 1980s. The gender gap in college attendance rates has continued to increase ever since. In this paper, I examine several factors that might affect the diverging college entrance patterns for young men and women. Using three nationally representative longitudinal data sets of high school students, I find that women's high school performance-as measured by test scores and the number of math and science courses taken-increased more rapidly then men's over the past three decades. A simple decomposition exercise indicates that women's greater advances in high school achievement can account for more than half of the change in the college enrollment gender gap over the past three decades. Using a simple theoretical model, I show that the contribution of women's superior performance in high school to women's increased college attendance combines both the effects of exogenous changes in how high schools prepare women for college and changes in high school performance induced by women's optimizing responses to increased labor market opportunities.
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As the gender gap in pay between women and men has been narrowing, the 'family gap' in pay between mothers and nonmothers has been widening. One reason may be the institutional structure in the United States, which has emphasized equal pay and opportunity policies but not family policies, in contrast to other countries that have implemented both. The authors now have evidence on the links between one such family policy and women's pay. Recent research suggests that maternity leave coverage, by raising women's retention after childbirth, also raises women's levels of work experience, job tenure, and pay. Copyright 1998 by American Economic Association.
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