Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education

Report here. Excerpt:

'This paper, by two MIT economists, David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, presents the reader with two of the biggest and most important trends in recent decades. The first is the growing disparity between men and women in both educational attainment and economic well-being; the second is the change in family structure. The growing disparity between men and women is easy to overlook given the fact that at the very top of our society power and money is still overwhelmingly held by men. And yet, when we move to the realm of more ordinary people we see, in the words of Autor and Wasserman, “...a tectonic shift. Over the last three decades, the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.”'