In the 1960s, two landmark statutes—the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts—targeted the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. For the next 15 years, the gender gap in median earnings among full-time, full-year workers changed little, leading many scholars to conclude the legislation was ineffectual. This paper revisits this conclusion using two research designs, which leverage (1) cross-state variation in pre-existing state equal pay laws and (2) variation in the 1960 gender gap across occupation-industry-state-group cells to capture differences in the legislation's incidence. Both designs suggest that federal anti-discrimination legislation led to striking gains in women's relative wages, which were concentrated among below-median wage earners. These wage gains offset pre-existing labor-market forces which worked to depress women's relative pay growth, resulting in the apparent stability of the gender gap at the median and mean in the 1960s and 1970s. The data show little evidence of short-term changes in women's employment but suggest that firms reduced their hiring and promotion of women in the medium to long term. The historical record points to the key role of the Equal Pay Act in driving these changes.

中文翻译：

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1963 年同工同酬法案和 1964 年民权法案如何塑造薪酬中的性别差距


20 世纪 60 年代，两项具有里程碑意义的法规——《同工同酬法案》和《民权法案》——针对的是美国妇女长期存在的就业歧视做法。在接下来的 15 年里，全职、全年工中收入中位数的性别差距几乎没有变化，导致许多学者得出立法无效的结论。本文使用两种研究设计重新审视了这一结论，其中利用（1）现有各州同工同酬法律中的跨州差异和（2）1960 年职业-行业-国家群体单元之间性别差距的差异来捕捉立法的发生率。这两种设计都表明，联邦反歧视立法导致女性相对工资显着提高，而女性的相对工资主要集中在低于中位数的工资收入者中。这些工资增长抵消了先前存在的劳动力市场力量，这些力量抑制了女性的相对工资增长，导致 20 世纪 60 年代和 1970 年代性别差距中位数和平均数明显稳定。数据显示，几乎没有证据表明女性就业发生短期变化，但表明企业在中长期内减少了对女性的雇用和晋升。历史记录表明《同工同酬法案》在推动这些变化中发挥了关键作用。