Monthly Labor Review @bullet Women's Employment Earnings Education and Women's Employment in the United States, Women's Employment, Education, and the Gender Gap in 17 Countries

One commonsense view of women’s employment is that working-class women have always been more likely to work for pay than other women because of their families’ need for their paycheck. But in fact, recent evidence shows higher levels of employment for highly educated women than for the less educated, despite the fact that well-educated women typically have higher earning husbands. This article uses data from a number of highand middle-income countries to investigate how women’s employment and hours worked, and the gender gap in annual and hourly earnings, vary by educational level. Focusing on commonalities across countries, the analyses presented are limited to adults 25 to 54 years of age who have a marital or cohabiting partner of the other gender and, for some considerations, to the subset of these adults who have children in the household. The countries examined are Austria, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom (U.K.), the United States (U.S.), and Uruguay.1