\n\n\n" }I limited myself to full-year private sector workers with a bachelors degree who were ages 21 to 26 in 2009-2010. Within this group I controlled for age, race, Hispanic and immigrant status, detailed geographic location, weekly work hours, college major and occupation. Controlling for college major accounts for the fact that men tend to choose majors that lead to higher earnings later in life. Controlling for occupation captures \u00e2\u0080\u009ccompensating wage differentials\u00e2\u0080\u009d for positive or negative aspects of the job. For instance, dangerous or unpleasant jobs may pay more, while jobs offering flexible hours or more generous benefits might pay less. Including all these controls, the gender pay gap for young college grads drops to around 1 percent.
\nEven then, do my results mean that discrimination reduces pay by 1 percent? Hardly. It\u00e2\u0080\u0099s well known that women negotiate over pay less aggressively than men. Better negotiating tactics could easily generate a 1 percent pay difference. More broadly, the 1 percent figure denotes the unexplained pay difference \u00e2\u0080\u0093 simply because the data we have can\u00e2\u0080\u0099t explain it doesn\u00e2\u0080\u0099t mean the difference is due to discrimination. Better data might explain even more of the difference. Moreover, even if discrimination exists \u00e2\u0080\u0093 and it surely does, even if its overall effects aren\u00e2\u0080\u0099t huge \u00e2\u0080\u0093 the cure of greater government control over the labor market might be worse than the disease.
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