Double burden on women

Double burden on women

How come Robert Redford is cool and that's it and when one talks about Meryl Streep people say she's „cool despite her age”? Age is probably a handicap for women in many occupations: acting, tv anchoring, modelling, etc. But how general is the phenomenon? Have you ever stopped to consider if for a woman experience counts the same as for a man?

We did. And it is not very easy, because comparing older and younger men and women at one point in time makes no sense: they differ by much more than just age. For example, they were educated in different programs, their working experience is different, so is labor market position, typically. Ideally, one would want to observe what happens to gender wage gap as people age. We came up with a way to do it — some econometric magic and there it goes: women experience a an increase of gender wage gap as they age. An overview of our paper was presented in ASSA 2017 in Chicago.