Knowledge Obsolescence and Women’s Occupational Sorting: New Evidence from Citation Data

Abstract

Abstract Occupational sorting now is one of the main drivers of the gender wage gap. Differential rates of human capital depreciation, or knowledge obsolescence, have been put forward as one potential explanation. This paper provides new evidence on this relationship using a dataset on academic citations constructed by the authors. The dataset covers numerous fields and decades, making it a more recent and comprehensive measure of human capital depreciation. Using data on occupations from the ACS we find that higher rates of knowledge obsolescence are associated with reductions in women’s presence in a field. We also find that knowledge obsolescence reduces female presence in college majors at the undergraduate level.