The Gender-Based Wage Gap in Real Estate

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In discussing gender-based wages, there are five approaches to explaining the inequalities that have plagued female U.S. laborers since their collective advent into the workforce in the 1940s. The five explanations typically cited by economists are segregation, human capital, employer preference, statistical discrimination, and institutional discrimination.
Segregation refers to the differences among professions. This approach takes into account the fact that there are occupations that generally have higher wages than other occupations. This is related to gender-based wage differences because women may typically be drawn away from the higher paying occupations because of societal gender roles and stereotypes.
The second approach to explaining gender-based wage inequality is human capital. Human capital acknowledges the fact that often times women invest in human capital that will have lower market returns because they avoid getting involved in career areas that may interfere with their familial duties later in life. Because women invest in less or lower returning human capital they tend to make lower wages than men who invest in more valuable human capital.
The remaining explanations of gender-based wage differences fall under the umbrella category of discrimination. Employer preference discusses the ways in which employers differentiate between potential employees based on noneconomic factors such as physical appearance. Statistical discrimination uses the ways in which employers stereotype groups of people and therefore avoid hiring certain people because of their association with a typical group. This plays into the gender-based wage gap because employers tend to view women as the group they are a part of – the female popula...

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...uying real estate, so they may be likely to spend more money on their male employees.
Real estate agents have one of the largest gender-based wage gaps in today’s economy. There is not one particular economic approach that explains this gap, but a combination of the human capital and statistical discrimination models may account for much of the gap between the wages of male and female real estate agents.

Works Cited

Braunstein, Elissa. "Explaining Gender Differences in Pay." [PowerPoint Slides] 17 Oct. 2013. Lecture.
Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2012. Rep. no. 1045. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Oct. 2013. Web. 1 Dec. 2013.
Rowley, Laura. "Reentering the Job Market." DailyFinance.com. AOL Money & Finance, 5 Sept. 2011. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.
Waldron, Travis. "The 10 Jobs With The Biggest Gender Wage Gap." ThinkProgress. N.p., 9 Apr. 2013. Web. 29 Nov. 2013.

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