Gender inequality in the U.S. labor market: Evidence from LEHD employment data

Inequality by race and gender is a popular discussion topic in government policy and academic research. Wage inequality could result from many factors such as worker characteristics (education, experience, language et al), discrimination, location, occupation and industry. The purpose of this paper is to study race inequality in the U.S. labor market and measure it by wage differentials and employment segregation.;The analysis in the paper is mainly applied on the data from Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) at census. The advantage of this dataset is that it provides longitudinal labor statistics by geography, industry, worker demographics and firm characteristics. Gender Earning Gap and Gender Employment Gap are the two measurement defined to analyze the gender inequality.;This paper reflects a great amount of data curation, annualizing the quarterly data over a thirteen-year period, calculating the gender inequality measurements for employment and earnings by industry, and selecting subsets of industry and county data to create visualization. The analysis includes the basic descriptive statistics of counties and industries, state pattern across years and industry pattern across states, and case studies on selected seven industries and six counties.;The thesis is an exploratory analysis of the dataset and identifies some patterns at the geographic and industry level. But, the analytic methodology is not sufficiently sophisticated enough to detect other deep patterns within counties and it also does not explore the potential factors that are correlated to these patterns. These could be topics for future research.;Key words: Gender Inequality, Geography, Industry, QWI, Employment Gap, Earning Gap.