Publications

2026

1. Social Forces

   The Role of Graduate Education in the Rising Wage Premium for Professional and Managerial Occupations, 1980-2019

   Felix Busch, Paula England, and Wenhao Jiang

   Social Forces (forthcoming), 2026

   Abs DOI Code

   Part of the rise in U.S. wage inequality comes from a widening gap between professional/managerial (PM) and other occupations (NPM). We examine the role of education in the trend in this gap from 1980 to 2019. Prior research typically combined all college graduates in one category, but we highlight the distinctive role of graduate degrees. Since 1980, NPM occupations have never had as many as 5 percent with a graduate degree, but by 2019, 36 percent of individuals in PM occupations had a graduate degree. Using a decomposition-of-change technique, we show that the increased gap between NPM and PM in the proportion of their workers with graduate degrees explains 19 percent of the growth in the gap. A two-way fixed-effects analysis shows that those occupations that increased their proportion of workers with a graduate degree more had steeper wage growth. Wage returns rose modestly for BA/BS degrees and dramatically for having a graduate degree. However, a BA/BS degree was less likely to get one a PM job in 2019 than 1980, whereas a graduate degree was just as likely to get one a PM job in 2019 as 1980. We discuss how our findings fit predictions from three theoretical perspectives emphasizing skill-biased technological change, the expanding knowledge economy, and increased credentialism.

2025

1. ASR

   The Cultural Devaluation of Feminized Work: The Evolution of U.S. Occupational Prestige and Gender Typing in Linguistic Representations, 1900 to 2019

   Wenhao Jiang

   American Sociological Review, 2025

   Burt award Abs DOI Supplement Code

   This paper received the Ronald Burt Award for the Best Graduate Paper in Economic Sociology of the American Sociological Association in 2025, and the Aage B. Sørensen Sward from the International Sociological Association, RC28 Social Stratification in 2022.

   Previous research on occupational devaluation typically evaluates the potential wage declines associated with a significant inflow of women into an occupation; results have been mixed. Few studies, however, examine the cultural mechanism central to the thesis, where an occupation’s symbolic value in multiple dimensions changes in response to the dynamics of its cultural association with women. This paper proposes a new semantic approach to trace the devaluation process in American culture, where occupation titles appear in scholarly and public discourses with varied semantic proximity to gender- and prestige-signaling phrases over time. Decade-specific occupation embedding (1900-2019) from 127 billion words of American English across genres and a novel fixed-effects estimator show a latent cultural bias against women’s work, such that an occupation’s general prestige and perceived potency (but not its moral standing) declines when it becomes increasingly stereotyped as female. The largest penalties are found in lower- and middle-wage occupations, while most high-wage occupations, despite experiencing large increases in female share in recent years, are persistently stereotyped as male professions without a prestige loss. In total, the cultural mechanism of devaluation accounts for 22.4-25.9% of the observed negative link between occupations’ female typing and hourly wages.