The impact of education and seniority on the male‐female wage gap: is more education the answer?

Although numerous studies have investigated wage‐level determinants, they have tended to concentrate on the effects of human capital and sex discrimination on wage levels while rarely addressing the interactive effects of education, seniority, and gender. This paper attempts to redress that imbalance. The results of this study show that gender and education have a strongly positive and interactive effect on income. If all other factors (e.g. years of service, job position) are held constant, then higher education leads to an increase in the wages of both males and females. However, above the junior‐college level, more education produces a larger increase in the wage rate for females than for males. The implication is that, although males have been seen to benefit from the impact of additional education on wages, more education for females may still help narrow the gender‐based wage gap.