The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap

The American gender wage gap remains a yawning chasm, but people are looking for the cause in the wrong place, argues sociology professor Besen-Cassino in this fascinating study. Discussions of the lower wages earned by females focus on adult women, but, according to Besen-Cassino’s data, gendered inequality begins at the point when most Americans enter the labor force—in high school. As the author pointedly observes, most academic explanations for the lower wages earned by women emphasize adult employment and thus miss a crucial piece of the puzzle. Besen-Cassino finds that teenage boys tend to have more formal and higher-paying jobs, while teenage girls tend to be offered informal jobs such as babysitting, and thus lag behind their male peers when they enter the adult labor market. She makes a solid case for studying young workers; many of the factors that make adult studies complex are not present, as her subjects are unmarried, don’t have children, and have about the same education as their male counterparts. Besen-Cassino also observes that policymakers cannot hope to remedy the gender wage gap if they ignore the period in women’s lives when this disparity first occurs. This essential look at the origins of the persistent spread between a woman’s lifetime earning potential and a man’s casts a startling new light on an old problem. (Dec.)