Equal Pay for Equal Task: Assessing Heterogeneous Returns to Tasks across Genders

Abstract

We inspect the heterogeneous association between tasks and wages across genders using individual-level data on U.S. workers. Our findings suggest that women receive a higher wage premium when engaged in cognitive tasks and experience more contained wage losses when performing manual activities. However, a wage penalty characterizes women engaged in highly social intensive jobs. Further inspection reveals that this result is especially driven by the teamwork component of social activities.198 / ELIZABETH J. CASABIANCA, ALESSIA LO TURCO, AND CLAUDIA PIGINI Equal Pay for Equal Task / 199 6 The survey also contains information on whether the worker is a member of a labor union and/or whether the job is covered by a union. However, due to missing data, the use of this piece of information would make us drop a further 150 observations without substantially changing our insights. We, therefore, decided not to include unionization as a control in our analysis, as the drop in the sample size could jeopardize the precision of our estimates, especially when we deal with the endogenous task selection issue. 202 / ELIZABETH J. CASABIANCA, ALESSIA LO TURCO, AND CLAUDIA PIGINI