The gender gap in early career wage growth : the role of children, job and occupational mobility

During the first ten years in the labor market, male university graduates experience a faster wage growth than their female counterparts in the Swedish labor market. This paper investigates the role of job mobility and upward occupational mobility in explaining the gender gap in early career wage growth. The analysis reveals that, although job and occupational mobility significantly contributes to the early career wage growth of both males and females, the size of the wage growth effect of both types of mobility are significantly lower for females. This female mobility penalty persists even after accounting for gender differences in observable individual and job characteristics as well as unobserved individual specific heterogeneity. We further investigate to what extent this mobility penalty of women is explained by parental status. We find that women’s penalty in returns to upward occupational mobility is largely linked to the timing of childbirth and child care, which suggests the presence of a trade-off between work and family. But women’s penalty in returns to “voluntary” job mobility does not seem to be mainly associated with parental status, in which a sizable gender gap in return to “voluntary” job mobility is found among the childless as well as parents