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Chapter 1 Exploring Gender Differences in Employment and Wage Trends Among Less-Skilled Workers Rebecca M. Blank and Heidi Shierholz A s many of the chapters in this volume emphasize, labor force participation and real wage rates among less-skilled men have fallen since the late 1970s.1 A substantial literature has investigated the declining returns to less-skilled jobs and the growing wage inequality between more- and less-skilled workers in the U.S. labor market (Autor and Katz 1999; Autor, Katz, and Kearney 2004). Most of this literature, however, has focused on men. The research on the effects of welfare reform has recognized growing labor force participation among less-skilled women, but rarely does it directly compare the very different trends among less-skilled men and women. In contrast to their male counterparts, real wages among less-skilled women have not fallen, and their labor force participation has in fact risen. This chapter investigates trends in labor market outcomes for both male and female workers of different skill levels over the past twenty-five years. We look at gender differences by skill level in labor force participation and wages, exploring why less-skilled women have done better than less-skilled men in recent decades, even while losing ground relative to more-skilled women. This chapter also provides background information for the rest of this volume, showing the comparative trends among more- and less-skilled workers, by gender, since the late 1970s. The differential trends in labor market outcomes by skill and gender raise a number of questions. To what extent do these trends reflect differences in the human capital characteristics that men and women bring into the labor market? For instance, as we shall see, full-time work experience has risen among women and fallen among men, and education levels have risen faster among women than among men. Alternatively, these trends may reflect differences in the jobs / 23 Working and Poor held by men and women or changes in how men’s and women’s skills are valued . For instance, if discrimination against women has fallen in the past three decades, women may have gained ground in the labor market relative to men. There is a large literature on trends in male-female wage differences among all workers (Altonji and Blank 1999; Bayard et al. 2003; Blau and Kahn, forthcoming ), but it gives little attention to gender differences by skill level (for an exception , see Blau and Kahn 1997 or Blau 1998). Furthermore, there is very little literature on differential trends in labor force participation between women and men. Two recent papers address this topic (Blau and Kahn 2005; Mulligan and Rubinstein 2005), but again, they do not look at differences across skill groups. This chapter explores these gender- and skill-related trends in a relatively simple way, identifying areas where more statistically and theoretically complex analyses might add to our ability to better understand these changes. TRENDS IN LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES BY SKILL LEVEL AND GENDER In this section, we examine long-term trends in four key labor market outcomes: trends in labor force participation rates, unemployment rates, wage rates, and the overall responsiveness of labor market outcomes to economic cycles.2 In each case, we present these trends over the past twenty-five years by gender and skill level. Throughout this chapter, we focus on men and women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. We define “less-skilled” as those whose highest educational credential is a high school degree or less, and we compare them to the “more-skilled,” defined as those who have post–high school training. When discussing the less-skilled, we frequently distinguish between those with a high school degree and high school dropouts. We analyze data from 1979 through 2004. The data in this section are based on tabulations from the Current Population Survey outgoing rotation groups (ORG) data, which provide large annual samples.3 Labor Force Participation Figure 1.1 plots labor force participation rates, the share of all adults who are either working or looking for work, for men (darker lines) and women (lighter lines) by skill level. Labor force participation among those with less than a high school degree is shown by the solid lines, among those with a high school degree by the long dashed lines, and among those with more than a high school degree by the short dashed lines. The most visible feature of figure 1.1 is the narrowing...

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