Labor Force Participation Over the Life Course: The Long-Term Effects of Employment Trajectories on Wages and the Gendered Payoff to Employment

Abstract

In this article, we consider how individuals’ long-term employment trajectories relate to wage inequality and the gender wage gap in the United States. Using more than 30 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 sample, we identify six employment trajectories for individuals from ages 22 to 50. We find that women across racial/ethnic groups and Black men are more likely than White and Hispanic men to have nonsteady employment trajectories and lower levels of employment throughout their lives, and individuals who have experienced poverty also have heightened risks of intermittent employment. We then assess how trajectories are associated with wages later in careers, at ages 45–50. We find significant variation in wages across work trajectories, with steady high employment leading to the highest wages. This wage variation is primarily explained by work characteristics rather than family characteristics. Finally, we examine gender variation in within-trajectory wages. We find that the gender wage gap is largest in the steady high employment trajectory and is reduced among trajectories with longer durations of nonemployment. Thus, although women are relatively more concentrated in nonsteady trajectories than are men, men who do follow nonsteady wage trajectories incur smaller wage premiums than men in steady high employment pathways, on average. These findings demonstrate that long-term employment paths are important predictors of economic and gender wage inequality.

Gender earnings gap among the youth in Malawi

“…Youth labor force participation is a daunting challenge that all countries face (Anyanwu, 2013; Baah‐Boateng, 2013). Not only do the income level and the type of employment affect the short‐term quality of life, but they can also affect the young workers’ future job prospects and income over their lifetimes (Nilsson, 2019; Weisshaar & Cabello‐Hutt, 2020). Moreover, youth represent a substantial proportion of the working population in developing countries; in particular, there are 200 million youth aged between 15 and 24 in Africa (Elder & Koné, 2014).…”

Gender Earnings Gap among Urban Youth Adults in Bangladesh: A Comparative Static Analysis

“…Most of the countries face challenges in providing employment to the labor force, especially the youth labor force (Anyanwu, 2013). The discrimination in the early period of employment not only affects their short-term quality of life through lower income and employment but also affects the future prospect of the youth workers and their lifetime incomes (Nilsson, 2019;Weisshaar & Cabello-Hutt, 2020). From the viewpoint of labor market discrimination, which is a common scenario in all countries with some variations, there exist many studies that have explored the gender earnings or pay gap from different perspectives.…”

Racial/Ethnic Variation in the Relationship between Educational Assortative Mating and Wives’ Income Trajectories

“…Like prior work on this topic (e.g., Damaske and Frech, 2016;Qian, 2017;Weisshaar and Cabello-Hutt, 2020), we decide on the number of trajectory groups based on both standard statistical metrics and more subjective criteria, including the distinctiveness of the trajectories, the sizes of the groups, prior empirical work, and theoretical grounding (Nagin, 2005). Table 2 presents two commonly used measures of model fit-the average posterior probabilities (APP)…”

“…Third, we join the small yet growing body of work that uses group-based trajectory models to capture the long-term, dynamic nature of married women's employment pathways over time (Damaske and Frech 2016;Qian, 2018;Visser and Fang 2018;Weisshaar and Cabello-Hutt 2020). This approach offers insights into how white, black, and Hispanic women balance their work activities with competing family events.…”