Rhetoric in economic research: The case of gender wage differentials

Scientific rhetoric can have a profound impact on the perception of research; it can also drive and direct further research efforts. What determines whether results are discussed in a neutral or a judgmental way? How precise and convincing do results have to be so that authors call for significant policy changes? These questions are in general difficult to answer, because rhetoric on the one hand, and content and methodology of the paper on the other, cannot be separated easily. We therefore used a unique example to examine this question empirically: the analysis of gender wage differentials. Here, the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition represents a standard research method that compares male and female earnings, holding observable factors constant. We analyzed close to 200 papers to investigate what drives authors to talk about discrimination, whether and when they call for policy activism, or when they are more hesitant to do so. Our results show that American authors are more reluctant to refer to discrimination. So are women, but only with respect to the titles of their papers. Furthermore, we find that the better the data and method used in a paper, the more likely an author is to assign his/her estimate of unequal wages to discrimination. The contrary is true the higher the prestige of the author or the research outlet.