Yana Gallen

The Labor Market Returns to Delaying Pregnancy
with Juanna Schroter Joensen, Eva Rye Johansen, and Gregory F. Veramendi
Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Review

We estimate the effect of unplanned children on the careers of women identified from failures of long-acting reversible birth contraceptives. Using linked health and labor market data from Sweden, we find that unplanned pregnancies halt women's career progression resulting in income losses of 20% by five years after the initial contraceptive failure. The detrimental effects of unplanned pregnancies are larger for younger women and women enrolled in education, suggesting that unplanned births are particularly disruptive early in the career. In contrast, when we study the impact of children identified from quasi-random success of fertilization procedures, we find small impacts of children. Taken together, the results suggest that children can have large disruptive effects on careers, and by timing pregnancy women mitigate these disruptions.

Informed Choices: Gender Gaps in Career Advice
with Melanie Wasserman
Reject and Resubmit at Review of Economic Studies

This paper provides the first causal evidence that gender affects the information an individual receives about careers. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek career information from 10,000 working professionals. We randomize whether a professional receives a message from a male or a female student. When students ask broadly for information about a career, female students receive substantially more information on work/life balance relative to male students. This gender difference persists even when students specifically state an interest in learning about work/life balance. We develop a new methodology to combine our experimental estimates with student preferences for professionals. Allowing students to choose which professionals they interact with does not reduce gender disparities in access to information, nor does it align the information students receive with the information they demand. The conversations students have with professionals matter: information on work/life balance deters students from their preferred career path.

Motherhood and the gender productivity gap
Accepted at Journal of the European Economic Association

Using Danish matched employer-employee data, I compare the relative pay of men and women to their relative productivity as measured by production function estimation. I find that the gender "productivity gap" is 8 percent, implying that almost two thirds of the residual gender wage gap is due to productivity differences between men and women. Motherhood plays an important role, yet it also reveals a puzzle: the pay gap for mothers is entirely explained by productivity, whereas the gap for non-mothers is not. In addition, the decoupling of pay and productivity for women without children happens during their prime-child bearing years. These estimates are robust to a variety of specifications for the impact of observables on productivity, and robust to accounting for endogenous sorting of women into less productive firms using a control-function approach. This paper also provides estimates of the productivity gap across industries and occupations, finding the same general patterns for mothers compared to women without children within these subgroups.

Does Information Affect Homophily?
(with Melanie Wasserman)
Accepted at Journal of Public Economics

It is common for mentorship programs to use race, gender, and nationality to match mentors and mentees. Despite the popularity of these programs, there is little evidence on whether mentees value mentors with shared traits. Using novel administrative data from an online college mentoring platform connecting students and alumni, we document that female students indeed disproportionately reach out to female mentors. To disentangle whether this observed homophily is explained by taste-based or statistical discrimination, we implement a preference elicitation survey paired with an within-survey experiment. We find that homophily is entirely explained by a lack of information on mentor quality. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of initiatives that match on shared traits.

The labor market gender gap in Denmark: Sorting out the past 30 years
(with Rune Lesner and Rune Vejlin)
Labour Economics, 56 (2019) pp. 58-67

We document the declining gap between the average earnings of women and men in Denmark from 1980 to 2010. The decline in the earnings gap is driven by increases in hours worked by women as well as a decline in the gender wage gap. The data show a great deal of segregation across education tracks, occupations, and even workplaces, but this segregation has declined since 1980. These changes in segregation have been accompanied by a reduction in the role of observables in explaining the gender wage gap. The residual gender wage gap has been constant since 1980. The hours gap is not affected by changes in segregation at the occupation and education level: differences in these characteristics for women relative to men do not contribute to the hours gap in 2010 and they did not in 1980. However, a firm-worker fixed effects analysis suggests that 30 percent of the gender hours gap can be explained by the sorting of women into lower-hours workplaces. The hours gap is driven by mothers, the group for whom differences in employer, occupation, education, and experience also imply large differences in wages. The combined effect of hours and wages is a more than 20 percent gender earnings gap among well-attached (halftime-plus) workers between 25 and 60 years old, 10 percent of which cannot be explained by differences in hours, or in the readily observable characteristics of these workers.