Long Run French Careers in the Private Sector: Women's Vs. Men's

Since 30 years, the emergence of unemployment and the instability of the economic conditions have led to questioning the canonical model for male careers without interruptions. At the same time, the women' participation rate has increased: they interrupt less and less activity because of motherhood and children's education. However, the women's careers still differ from men's. In static terms, women's jobs are characterized by short contracts, part-time and interruptions. In terms of life cycle, the gender wage gap reflects the effects of the whole career rather than pure wage discrimination: ceteris paribus, the differences are built during the career according to promotions and bonus systems more favourable to men. In terms of generation, women's careers, characterized in the past by long periods of child education and inactivity, are now characterized by more part-time and fixed-term contracts. The aims of our work are to identify several types of wage-careers and to predict the future wages using the wage function estimated for each career-type. This work may furthermore be used to evaluate the impacts of the different reforms on the expected pension amount for the future generations of retirees. First we will present the specificities of women's wage-careers during the life cycle and between generations, with a review of the empirical literature on this topic. Second we will present the data used, the EIC. Third we will describe the method and the first results obtained for two generations (1946 and 1962). We can observe convergence of wage profiles but persistence of inequalities.