Dynamics of Claims Making and Gender Wage Gaps in the United States and Norway

This paper compares claims making and gender wage gaps in the United States and Norway, and asks how public sector employment moderates the association between gender segregation and the gender gap in wages in the two countries. Using nationally representative data and hierarchical linear modeling, we analyze gender wage gaps within and between job types. The analyses show that job types heavily concentrated in the public sector, effectively insulated from regular market dynamics, have small if any gender wage gaps. Drawing on relational inequality theory, we argue that this results from the absence of opportunities for individual level claims making. Dynamics of Claims Making and Gender Wage Gaps in the United States and Norway