Women's Wages Grow Faster Than Men's as Social Skills Reign

Employers seeking strong social skills are going after women -- and wage growth in recent years reflects the increased demand, according to a newly released research paper from Rakesh Kochhar at Pew Research Center.

The average hourly wage for females jumped 45% between 1980 and 2018, compared with 14% for males, Kochhar found, although men still made more money on average: $26 versus $22 an hour.

Women now hold the majority of professions most heavily dependent on social and fundamental skills such as lawyers, teachers and consulting. For the purposes of his analysis, Kochhar considers social skills to include negotiation and persuasion, while critical thinking and writing count as fundamental skills.

These types of careers are among the fastest-growing in the U.S. labor market, more than doubling between 1980 and 2019, he found. Meanwhile, jobs requiring mechanical skills stagnated.

Women are seeing an education wage premium. Since 2007, a greater share of women than men have graduated from college. In 2018, 40% of employed women held a bachelor’s degree compared to 35% of men, according to the report.

Occupations where social skills are most important paid $29 per hour on average in 2018, while “jobs relying the least on social skills -- slaughterers and meat packers, for example -- paid a mean hourly wage of $18, about 40% less,” Kochhar wrote.

In 2018, nearly three-in-four women worked at positions where social skills were highly important, and two-thirds held jobs where fundamental skills were paramount.

Women also made inroads in professions long dominated by men, such as dentistry, Kochhar found.

Occupations in which mechanical skills are most important barely registered an increase in employment from 1980 to 2018 and these types of jobs are overwhelmingly held by men.