The link between gender gaps and employment polarization

The increase in employment shares both at the bottom and at the top of the skill distribution, combined with a decline in the middle, has been extensively documented for the US and many OECD economies since the 1980s. This observed employment polarization has become a well-known stylized fact (Autor et al. 2006; Acemoglu and Autor 2011; Autor and Dorn 2013; Goos and Manning 2007; Michaels et al. 2014; Goos et al. 2014). Less well known are the characteristics of employment polarization by gender, as polarization is usually studied at an aggregate level. Nonetheless, when studying employment polariza-tion, in Cerina et al. (2021) we also consider one of the most important and dramatic social phenomena of the 20th century: the rise in female labor force participation, coupled with a rise in broad college attainment and a closing of the gender wage gap