Just to let you know we are still listening and enchanted by these distribution curves -the last one assymetrical, no?
The information in the standard graphs comparing men and women's compensation over this span is amazing. Note that women with low education are paid better than men from 1980 on. In fact, unless the men had post graduate degrees, they were paid less from the mid 80s on. Also the spread indicates that one really pays for it if you are male and don't get educated. It appears the females have other attributes in their arsenal besides those academic credentials. 8)

Note that women with low education are paid better than men from 1980 on. In fact, unless the men had post graduate degrees, they were paid less from the mid 80s on.

Relative to what each sex-cohort had been paid before. Men without a high school diploma in 2002 received 105% of what they would in 1961; for women without an HSD, it was 135%. Within this education-cohort, women probably did make less than 77% of what men did (in 1963). If they made more than 77%, then yes, women in that education-cohort now do make more than men do.

(I'll check this to find out).

For the education-cohort of post-graduate degree holders, the wage gap--whatever it was in 1963--is now 1.1 times as great, and growing rapidly. This cohort, while small, is growing very fast, and for both men and women, its income has more than doubled.

Thanks for following along. I'm still learning as I post these.

On factor perhaps to be taken into account in the steep curve at the top of the income distribution hierarchy, i.e. the top percentile, is the growth in partnerships rather than public equity owned corporations, a development specifically encouraged by the Reagan tax reform of 1986. And it is noteworthy that 2/3 of the millions of such legally registered partnerships occur in the FIRE sector, that is, as channeling returns from the financial sector. What we have increasingly nowadays is a dominance of the income hierarchy by the "working rich", rather than the old rentier class. Presumably, the concentration of equity ownership among the latter was diluted during the post-was Keynesian boom, as their percentage of income declined, but as the effort was then made to align the interests of managers with equity-owners, the managers increasingly became themselves owners, while, in turn, gaining increasing control, as corporate insiders, over the flow of revenues and its extraction. So what we have at the top is not any less the extraction of profits at the expense of the laboring population than in the heyday of unregulated capitalism. It's just that the loci and methods of the extraction have changed. This rather than the relative valuation of the labor market for educational skills would seem to account for a large share of the gross inequality of income and wealth that has been developing. The relative value accruing to education would seem to rather apply at the level below the top percentile, but, even there, I've read that inequality within educational and educational cohorts has be growing...

For those not in the know: FIRE stands for "Finance, Insurance, & Real Estate"

I was hurrying because I had to go to work and so did not preview, hence I made a number of bloopers in my last comment. Sorry. That last point should have read that income inequality has been increasing within the same educational and income cohorts. So among people with the same level of education or in roughly the same income bracket, the skew of income toward the top income earners is occurring, in a manner analogous, if somewhat less extreme, to the skew in income within the top percentile vis-a-vis the rest of us. Information on the growth of partnerships comes from an article in a recent issue of the "New Left Review" on American income distribution that I perused about a month age. In general, I meant to express skepticism that the changing distribution of income results simply from the rational play of market factors, such as returns accruing to education, which itself has grown increasing expensive at the tertiary level, and the supposed increased marginal product of educated or highly "skilled", vs. semi-skilled labor. Rather I would think the focus should be on mechanisms that effect the distribution of economic surpluses between wages and profits, such as the decline of/assault on labor unions, the increased playing of working populations against each other, the uncompensated effects of increased "free trade", and the decreased relative cost of capital equipment as a substitute for labor, partly as a result of the development of IT, which not only grows exponentially of itself, but also plays a role in the design and as components of other capital goods, as well as their interface with modes of business organization, and partly from specifically targeted subsidies, such as accelerated depreciation allowances, that aim strategically at such enhanced substitutability, and hence at the increased extractive power accruing to the control and ownership of capital. Of course, various educated professional cadres are needed to implement such systems and experience enhance income opportunities, but not nearly to the degree that capital-derived income opportunities are enhanced. (The idea that gargantuan CEO compensation packages correlate with superior performance or returns to superior educational attainment is laughable.) The long-run (and perhaps not so long-run) worry about such an upwardly skewed trend in income distribution is that it would lead to shortfalls in effective aggregate demand and hence to deflationary cycles of overproduction and underconsumption, such as plagued the earlier era of unregulated high capitalism. Also that educational and other life-enhancing opportunities and goods would become increasingly inaccessible to large strata of the population, independent of their capacity to command distributions from the extractions of capital. Of course, the Keynesian compromise, that emerged out of the debacles of the previous era, with its government macroeconomic management and regulation and its welfare supplements to balance against the vargaries and shocks of markets, was supposed to save capitalism from the capitalists. But with the rising efforts and onslaughts of capital interests in the last generation, the coherence of governments and of their attendant political societies seems to have deteriorated. As to why this should have happened, I am as confused as the next fellow.

I stand redirected in my assessment of the starting points of men and women being equal. So the new improved version should read as follows: Lower educated males paid more heavily for their unaccredited education than their female counterparts. I'm sure this is partly explained by women moving out of the kitchen and other non-paid parts of the household. Maybe the shift of manufacturing jobs offshore also partly explains the lower wages men with less than college degrees received. Immigration (illegal) might also explain why the lower educated workers fared poorly.
I am still digesting the Fed research paper, a gold mine of information and hope to comment on John's lengthy posts.