Economics of Education Review 20 2001 165–180 www.elsevier.comlocateeconedurev
Educational attainment and the gender wage gap: evidence from the 1986 and 1991 Canadian censuses
Pamela Christie
a
, Michael Shannon
b,
a
Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada, 10 Wellington St., Hull, PQ, Canada
b
Department of Economics, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada Received 20 August 1998; accepted 20 July 1999
Abstract
The paper takes advantage of the detailed information on educational attainment and field of study provided in the Canadian Census to examine gender differences in educational attainment and the effect of these differences on the
gender earnings gap for full-time, full-year workers in Canada. Gender differences in field of study of post-secondary graduates are found to be an important contributor to the gap. This is an important finding given the lack of such data
in most studies of the gender gap. Gender differences in educational attainment account for virtually none of the gender gap in earnings in 1985 and 1990 — a result also found in earlier studies using less detailed attainment data. However,
projections suggest that although gender differences in attainment explain little of the gap in these years, the continuing improvement in women’s educational attainment relative to men has helped shrink the gap in the past and will likely
continue to do so.
2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
JEL classification: I2; J7; J3
Keywords: Education; Gender; Wages; Canada
1. Introduction
Human capital theory suggests that educational attain- ment will be an important determinant of labour earn-
ings. Consequently, differences by gender in educational attainment are a candidate for explaining the male-
female earnings gap. Canadian studies of the gender wage gap have attempted to measure the impact of edu-
cation by including educational variables in their analy- ses. A simple years of education regressor or a set of
educational attainment dummies are typical.
1
The Census
Corresponding author. Tel.: +
1-807-343-8382. E-mail
address: mike.shannonlakeheadu.ca
M. Shannon.
1
Baker, Benjamin, Desaulniers and Grant 1995, for example, use a years of education variable in their analysis of
the gender gap using 1971, 1981 and 1986 census data. Miller 1987 also uses a years of education measure. Studies relying
0272-775701 - see front matter
2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 7 2 - 7 7 5 7 9 9 0 0 0 5 8 - 8
provides more information on educational attainment than other Canadian microdata surveys. Furthermore, the
most recent censuses have provided information on field of study for post-secondary graduates. This paper uses
this superior data source to further investigate the impact of education on the gender gap in Canada.
The paper begins with a description of the educational data available from the 1986 and 1991 censuses. Differ-
ences in educational attainment and field of study by gender are then described and variation by year and age
grouping is used to infer how these differences have changed over time. Data on earnings by education level
are presented in Section 3 and some simple calculations of the importance of education to the gender wage gap
on special surveys such as the Labour Market Activity Survey or the Survey of Consumer Finances are confined to a 6–7 cate-
gory educational attainment variable.
166 P. Christie, M. Shannon Economics of Education Review 20 2001 165–180
are made. Section 4 presents econometric estimates of male and female earnings equations and assesses the
importance of disaggregated education data in explaining variation in earnings. The log-earnings gap is decom-
posed into residual and explained parts and the share of education in explaining the gap is calculated in Section
5. Section 6 compares the results to those of earlier stud- ies.
2. Data
