A large body of empirical evidence, including evidence from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, has documented the increasing proportion of economics Ph.D.s granted to women and the improved job placement and starting salaries of female assistant ;professors. But, women's longer time to tenure, lower probability of achieving tenure, relatively low publication rates, and a stagnating percentage of women in the associate/full ranks and the top-ranked departments has been documented thoroughly, with very little explanation offered by empirical research. This project collects information detailing the critical first seven years in the job market for a cohort of economists, in order to develop a better explanation of the patterns that appear later in the career cycle. Specifically, this project collects survey data for the purpose of exploring gender differences in salary and employment outcomes among Ph.D. economists. These new data will be merged with a data set constructed by the investigator in 1988-89 to create a longitudinal data base of approximately 300 Ph.D. economists who began their careers during Fall 1989. Women are somewhat over represented in the sample and academia is the major employment sector. The longitudinal nature of the data allows this project to _ examine current employment outcomes while controlling for an unusually complete set of explanatory variables collected when participants were just finishing graduate training A 1 and extensive characteristics collected from the new survey instrument. A problem with much of the previous research is the lack of adequate controls, a necessity for discerning whether observed differences between men and women stem from discrimination or human capital choices on the part of individuals.
