Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz: “We often hear that women earn “77 cents on the dollar” compared with men. However, the gender pay gap among recent college graduates is actually much smaller than this figure suggests. We estimate that among recent college graduates, women earn roughly 97 cents on the dollar compared with men who have the same college major and perform the same jobs. Moreover, what may be surprising is that at the start of their careers, women actually out-earn men by a substantial margin for a number of college majors. However, our analysis shows that as workers approach mid-career, the wage premium that young women enjoy in these majors completely disappears, and males earn a more substantial premium in nearly every major. We discuss some of the possible reasons why the gender wage gap widens as workers progress through their careers.  The Gender Wage Gap among Recent College Graduates – Economists have long found a persistent wage gap between male and female workers. These gaps are estimated by comparing the earnings of men and women using any number of nationally representative data sets, and often control for observable differences among workers, such as age and education. We conduct a similar exercise using the American Community Survey, an annual survey of roughly one percent of the population, which reports data on education and earnings together with a number of demographic characteristics. Our computations use data for the years 2009 through 2013, allowing us to zero in on the gender wage gap in the early careers of college graduates following the Great Recession…”