More women are among the top earners

Claudia Sahm has given us the link (pdf) for Guvenen, Kaplan, and Song, David Wessel the summary.  The paper abstract is this:

We analyze changes in the gender structure at the top of the earnings distribution in the United States over the last 30 years using a 10% sample of individual earnings histories from the Social Security Administration. Despite making large inroads, females still constitute a small proportion of the top percentiles: the glass ceiling, albeit a thinner one, remains. We measure the contribution of changes in labor force participation, changes in the persistence of top earnings, and changes in industry and age composition to the change in the gender composition of top earners. A large proportion of the increased share of females among top earners is accounted for by the mending of, what we refer to as, the paper floor — the phenomenon whereby female top earners were much more likely than male top earners to drop out of the top percentiles. We also provide new evidence at the top of the earnings distribution for both genders: the rising share of top earnings accruing to workers in the Finance and Insurance industry, the relative transitory status of top earners, the emergence of top earnings gender gaps over the life cycle, and gender di erences among lifetime top.

David pulls this out:

A trio of economists, wielding big data from Social Security’s records, says that in 1981-85, women constituted just 1.9% of the top 0.1% of earners (based on average earnings for those years) and 5.2% of the top 1%.

But a quarter-century later, in 2008-12, women were 10.5% of the top 0.1% and 27.5% of the top 1%.

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