THE EFFECT OF THE SEX COMPOSITION OF JOBS ON STARTING WAGES IN AN ORGANIZATION - FINDINGS FROM THE NLSY

We show that individuals in a job with a higher percentage of females earn lower starting wages with an employing organization. This holds t rue with controls for individuals' human capital, job demands for skil l or difficult working conditions, and detailed industry. We use a mea sure of sex composition that applies to detailed jobs. cells in a thre e-digit census occupation by three-digit census industry matrix. We us e pooled panel data from the 1979-1987 waves of the National Longitudi nal Survey of Youth. The unit of analysis is the spell-the time in whi ch a person worked for one organization. The dependent variable is the first wage in the spell. We use models with fixed-effects to control for unmeasured, unchanging individual characteristics, we also show re sults from OLS and weighted models for comparison. The negative effect on wages of the percentage female in one's job is robust across proce dures for black women, white women, and white men. For black men the s ign is always negative but the coefficient is often nonsignificant.