Related BLS programs | Related articles June 1984, Vol. 107, No.
6 Investigating the differences in weekly earnings of women and
men Studies seeking to identify and rank the most important
reasons for the earnings disparity between men and women have
proliferated in recent years. Although the many compendiums of
such studies frequently emphasize different viewpointsof
business, government, or academiathey have one aspect in common:
each reports an astonishingly wide variance in the explanatory
power of the factors used in the studies. For example, in a
summary of 16 studies published by various analysts between 1964
and 1979, Cynthia Lloyd and Beth Niemi show that the variables
in these studies explained from little or none of the sex-
earnings gap to as much as 71 percent.1 Such large differences
arise mostly from the variables selected for analysis, the
measure of earnings used (for example, hourly, annual), and the
source of the data. In general, models employing only a small
number of variablesfor example,