Despite a long record of research on the sources of the gender wage gap, a large fraction of gender wage differences remains unexplained. In this paper, we propose gender differences in social capital as a novel explanation for the gender wage gap. We use British data from the Understanding Society (UKHLS) survey and wage decompositions to estimate the contribution of social capital derived from network homophily, that is, the similarity to one's peer group, to the gender wage differential. Our results show that differences in network structure explain as much as 15% of the overall gender wage gap. This finding is largely driven by gender differences in the number of males among closest friends, while other social capital measures used in this study hardly matter. We further show that differences in returns to social capital are not statistically significant.

中文翻译：

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社会资本作为性别工资差距的部分解释

尽管对性别工资差距的来源进行了长期研究，但很大一部分性别工资差异仍未得到解释。在本文中，我们提出社会资本的性别差异作为性别工资差距的新解释。我们使用来自理解社会 (UKHLS) 调查和工资分解的英国数据来估计源自网络同质性的社会资本对性别工资差异的贡献，即与同龄人群体的相似性。我们的结果表明，网络结构的差异可以解释多达 15% 的总体性别工资差距。这一发现主要是由最亲密朋友中男性数量的性别差异驱动的，而本研究中使用的其他社会资本衡量标准几乎没有影响。