Most of the early work in the field attempted to explain gender wage or earnings gaps in the local labour market. The long run trends show that the gender wage gap narrowed considerably in the 1970s following the 1969 and 1972 equal pay cases and stabilised to between 15 and 20 per cent since the early 1980s (Borland 1999). In terms of causes, early studies such as Miller (1994) and Wooden (1999) identified occupational segregation as the key factor in observed gender-wage differentials – specifically, they showed that wages were lower in women-dominated occupations. Subsequent studies such as those of Lee and Miller (2004), Baron and Cobb-Clark (2010) and Cobb-Clark and Tan (2011), however, found that occupational segregation is in fact not a significant determinant of gender wage gaps. A survey article by Coelli (2014) reconciled these results by showing that the impact of occupational segregation on gender wage differentials depended on the way occupations are grouped in the studies – specifically, the paper demonstrated that larger gender wage gaps are observed when occupations are classified at more detailed levels. More recently, Borland and Coelli (2016) showed that occupational segregation in Australia has fallen over time, a result which aligned Australian experience with those of other advanced economies. Their analysis of longer-term data also revealed that occupations where men and women are concentrated have changed substantially over time, and that women tend to move from low-skill to high-skill occupations, while men primarily move from middle-skill to high-skill occupations, but also somewhat to low-skill occupations.
The glass ceiling effect has also attracted heavy attention from labour economists as a plausible explanation for observed gender wage differentials. Glass ceiling is a term used to refer to a set of office-wide policies, practices, attitudes and traditions in a society that prevent women from rising to the top positions in a firm. Miller (2005) and Kee (2006) were among the first to empirically demonstrate that the equality of earnings/wages of men and women in Australia are constrained by a glass ceiling and that this effect is more pronounced in the graduate labour market where wages are relatively high. Using a larger pool of more recent data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, Baron and Cobb-Clark (2010) confirmed the existence of a glass ceiling in the Australian labour market and added that it is more pronounced in the private sector than the public sector.
On studies that examine the impact of unemployment duration on gender inequality, findings from some recent research may be worth mentioning even if these studies are not necessarily focused on the tertiary-qualified workforce. Theodossiou and Zangelidis (2009) found that men switch from job-to-job more easily than women and that labour market transitions for women are less from job-to-job and more from job-to-unemployment. They also find that higher levels of education reduce the likelihood of transitioning from job to unemployment, particularly for women. Gokulsing and Tandrayen-Ragoobur (2014) found evidence that employers do prefer men over women even if women have higher education or if men have lower education and performance. Mitri (2021) meanwhile demonstrates that regardless of their educational attainment, women are more likely to be precariously employed compared to men and that higher education does not improve wage earnings for men or women within precarious work. All in all, these studies agree that higher levels of education resulted in a wage penalty for men, whereas women earned a wage premium at lower levels of educational attainment.
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