Factors shaping the gender wage gap among college-educated computer science workers

Abstract

Encouraging women to pursue STEM employment is frequently touted as a means of reducing the gender wage gap. We examine whether the attributes of computer science workers–who account for nearly half of those working in STEM jobs–explain the persistent gender wage gap in computer science, using American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2009 to 2019. Our analysis focuses on working-age respondents between the ages of 22 and 60 who had a college degree and were employed full-time. We use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression of logged wages on observed characteristics, before turning to regression decomposition techniques to estimate what proportion of the gender wage gap would remain if men and women were equally rewarded for the same attributes–such as parenthood or marital status, degree field, or occupation. Women employed in computer science jobs earned about 86.6 cents for every dollar that men earned–a raw gender gap that is smaller than it is for the overall labor force (where it was 82 percent). Controlling for compositional effects (family attributes, degree field and occupation) narrows the gender wage gap, though women continue to earn 9.1 cents per dollar less than their male counterparts. But differential returns to family characteristics and human capital measures account for almost two-thirds of the gender wage gap in computer science jobs. Women working in computer science receive both a marriage and parenthood premium relative to unmarried or childless women, but these are significantly smaller than the bonus that married men and fathers receive over their childless and unmarried peers. Men also receive sizable wage premiums for having STEM degrees in computer science and engineering when they work in computer science jobs, advantages that do not accrue to women. Closing the gender wage gap in computer science requires treating women more like men, not just increasing their representation.