蝌蚪网

Research Highlights Featured Chart

October 29, 2025

The stalled progress of gender equality in the US labor market

Life cycle profiles of wages help shed light on the economic progress of women relative to men.

Tyler Smith

Source: casezy

The gender wage gap narrowed dramatically from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, with women's wages converging toward those of men across all income levels. Then progress stalled, and despite continued advances in women's education and workforce participation over the subsequent quarter century, the gap has persisted. 

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Journal: Applied Economics, authors , , and show that important generational differences in how wage disparities develop over workers' careers help account for this stagnation. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the researchers tracked wages across multiple birth cohorts from 1976 to 2018, following each generation from age 25 through 55 to estimate the distribution of life cycle gender wage gaps during prime working years. 

Figure 5 from the authors’ paper shows their estimates broken down by educational attainment.

from Blundell et al. (2025)

Each column of panels in the figure represents different points in the wage distribution, namely the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles. Within each panel, colored lines track different birth cohorts from the 1920s through the 1990s, showing the difference in log wages between men and women at each age.

For less-educated workers, the wage gap typically doubles in the first decade of careers—jumping from 20 percent at age 25 to 40 percent by age 35—before moderating slightly. At the top end of the wage distribution, gaps narrowed for pre-1960s generations as they aged, but this convergence disappeared for those born in the 1960s and later. 

The wages of college-educated women exhibit a similar pattern. Women born in the 1940s and 1950s experienced substantial gap reductions after age 40, but generations after the 1960s showed no such improvement. At the 90th percentile, the 1970s cohort shows no improvement over the 1960s generation, and gaps may actually be widening for those born in the 1980s and 1990s.

These generational patterns suggest that wage gap reductions driven in prior decades by anti-discrimination enforcement, changing workplace norms, and shifting occupational choices have lost momentum and coincide with delayed child-rearing among recent cohorts of women.