The U.S. Gender Wage Gap

Francine D. Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell’s ILR School and a Professor of Economics at Cornell University. She is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research as well as a research fellow of the IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor).

A distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association, Dr. Blau received the IZA Prize for outstanding achievement in labor economics in 2010; she was the first woman to receive the award. In 2017, she received the Jacob Mincer Award from the Society of Labor Economists in recognition of contributions to the field of labor economics.

Dr. Blau has written extensively on gender issues, wage inequality, immigration, and international comparisons of labor market outcomes. She is the author, with Lawrence Kahn, of “At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor Market Performance in International Perspective,” recipient of the Richard A. Lester Prize for the outstanding book in labor economics and industrial relations for 2002.

Dr. Blau received a Doctorate in economics from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree from Cornell’s ILR School.

Eduardo Porter is an economics reporter for the Business section of The New York Times, where he was a member of the editorial board from 2007 to 2012 and the Economic Scene columnist from 2012 to 2018.

Mr. Porter is the author of two books: “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise” and “The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost.”

Mr. Porter began his career in journalism as a financial reporter for Notimex, a Mexican news agency, in Mexico City. He was deployed as a correspondent to Tokyo and London, and in 1996 he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, as editor of América Economía, a business magazine.

In 2000, Mr. Porter went to work at The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles to cover the growing Hispanic population. He joined The New York Times in 2004 to cover economics.

Erica Groshen is Senior Economics Advisor in the ILR Labor Dynamics Institute in Cornell’s ILR School and research fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. From 2013 to 2017, she served as the 14th commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and inflation. Before that, Dr. Groshen was vice president in the Research and Statistics Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her research has centered on jobless recoveries, wage rigidity and dispersion, and the role of employers in the labor market.

Dr. Groshen is the lead author of “Preparing U.S. Workers and Employers for an Autonomous Vehicle Future,” with Susan Helper, John Paul MacDuffie, and Charles Carson. She also co-authored “How New is the ‘New Employment Contract’?” from W.E. Upjohn Institute Press and co-edited “Structural Changes in U.S. Labor Markets: Causes and Consequences” from M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Dr. Groshen received the 2017 Susan C. Eaton Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alexander Colvin, Ph.D., ’99, is the Kenneth F. Kahn ’69 Dean and the Martin F. Scheinman ’75, M.S. ’76, Professor of Conflict Resolution at Cornell University’s ILR School.

Dean Colvin’s research and teaching focuses on employment dispute resolution, with a particular emphasis on procedures in non-union workplaces and the impact of the legal environment on organizations. His current research projects include empirical investigations of employment arbitration and cross-national analysis of labor law and dispute resolution. Dean Colvin is the co-author of “An Introduction to U.S. Collective Bargaining and Labor Relations” (with T. Kochan and H. Katz) and of “Arbitration Law “( with K. Stone and R. Bales).

Dean Colvin received his J.D. in 1992 from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. in 1999 from Cornell University. He received the 2003 Outstanding Young Scholar Award from the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA) and the 2000 Best Dissertation Award from the IRRA for his dissertation entitled “Citizens and Citadels: Dispute Resolution and the Governance of Employment Relations.” Before joining the faculty of the ILR School, Dean Colvin taught at Penn State University from 1999 to 2008.