When Time Binds: Returns to Working Long Hours and the Gender Wage Gap among the Highly Skilled

This paper explores the relationship between gender di¤erences in hours worked, the returns to working long hours, and the gender pay gap among highly educated workers. Using a cross-section of occupations, Goldin (2014) documents that occupations characterized by high returns to overwork are also those with the largest gender gap in earnings. Using panel data on occupations across cities over time, we show that these associations continue to hold even after accounting for di¤erences across occupations over time, di¤erences across cities over time, and di¤erences in characteristics of occupations that vary by city. To provide causal evidence on the demand for long hours and how it relates to gender wage gaps, we exploit exogenous crosscity variation in low-skilled immigrant ‡ows to proxy for changes in the prices of outsourcing household production. We …nd that low-skilled immigration leads to a reduction in the gender gap in weekly hours worked, as well as the gender pay gap, particularly in occupations that disproportionately reward longer hours of work. These results highlight the causal role of the returns to overwork in explaining the gender pay gap and suggest that reductions in the cost of supplying longer hours of work may allow women to close the gap in hours of work and to bene…t from higher wages. School of Management, Boston University. Email: [email protected] yNational University of Singapore. Email: [email protected]