Most women earn less than their male counterparts. Is that because employers discriminate against women or because women tend to change jobs and drop out of the labor force?
According to a report by Stanford researchers in the Journal of Labor Economics, the answer may depend on how much education a woman has. In a study of job turnover among young men and women in the 1980s, economist Anne Royalty found that high school-educated women, ages 22-30, did in fact leave the labor market more often than men, either because they were laid off or quit.
Among more educated young women, though, the pattern was different. They were no more likely than men to drop out of the labor market and were slightly less likely to change jobs. While the study does not prove that educated women's lower wages -- about 85 cents for every dollar earned by comparably educated men -- are mostly attributable to gender discrimination, Royalty notes that "there is definitely evidence against higher turnover being the root cause… at least at these younger ages."
