内容简介

Globally, women outpace men in college enrolment as higher education systems continue to expand. A widely held view attributes this trend to women benefiting more from the labour market returns of a college degree, creating stronger incentives for their educational investment. However, recent U.S. evidence challenges this assumption, showing that conventional log-wage measures understate top-earning disparities—where gender gaps are largest—revealing women actually receive a lower college premium than men. Moreover, rising earnings inequality in the U.S., driven largely by top-end income growth, has resulted in an expanding gender gap in education premium over time. Yet in contexts where women’s growing advantage in educational attainment coincides with declining returns to education among younger cohorts due to oversupply, the evolution of gender differences in college wage premium remains unclear. Leveraging four decades of census and large-scale survey data alongside age-period-cohort modeling, we examine trends in the college wage premium for men and women across three Chinese societies. While all three Chinese societies saw substantial higher education expansion and rising female college attainment, their trajectories in the relative female college premium diverged significantly. Our comparative analysis reveals striking variation across institutional and labour market contexts, demonstrating that women’s relative gains from college depend critically on structural and economic conditions. We conclude by discussing the broader social and policy implications of these findings.

主讲人简介

许多多，香港大学社会学系副教授，研究方向为社会分层与不平等及社会人口学，研究聚焦于教育社会学、劳动社会学与城市社会学的交叉领域，重点关注中国城市化进程中的儿童发展及青年就业问题。

研究获得香港研究资助局的多项资助，其研究成果发表在British Journal of Sociology, Work, Employment and Society, China Quarterly, Chinese Sociological Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies等国际期刊。