Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Four leading economists imagine the gender pay gap within the UK, US, Canada and Italy won’t ever disappear

Four leading economists imagine the gender pay gap within the UK, US, Canada and Italy won’t ever disappear

The gender pay gap will persist for the foreseeable future, contrary to trend-based forecasts that predict a convergence of incomes between men and ladies, a Recent study shows.

The narrowing of the wage gap between the mid-Nineteen Seventies and the early 2000s was because of narrowing income differences between female and male entrants to the labour market in most high-income economies, based on findings from the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

The 4 economists Jaime Arellano-Bover, Nicola Bianchi, Matteo Paradisi and Salvatore Lattanzio focused on the United States, Italy, Canada and the United Kingdom. They concluded that this convergence process got here to a halt within the early 2000s and that the next decline was due exclusively to the retirement of older cohorts with larger wage differences.

“Even more disappointing is that the convergence in opportunities for male and female workers that persisted until the mid-1990s was not due to improved prospects for younger women,” they said. “But rather to disproportionately poorer opportunities for younger men.”

Young men suffered significant “position losses,” especially in higher-paying corporations. The average wage for 25-year-old men within the United States fell from 50 percent in 1976 to the thirty ninth percentile of the wage distribution in 1995. Women on this age group stagnated across the thirtieth percentile.

A key think about earnings disparities stays the tutorial decisions of men and ladies. About 63 percent of the gender wage gap amongst U.S. college graduates entering the labor market is because of field of study, and this gap doesn’t diminish over the life cycle of a given age group, the study found.

This is a foul omen for future wage inequality.

“In the best case scenario, and assuming there are no structural breaks in the labor market, the gender wage gap will approach the level observed among new entrants to the labor market. This gap is still economically significant,” the authors say. “We assume that the gender wage gap will not disappear in the high-income countries in our study.”

The study was conducted by three academics – Arellano-Bover of Yale, Bianchi of Northwestern and Paradisi of Einaudi – while Lattanzio is an economist on the Bank of Italy.

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