Are Aggregated Returns to Education Equal Across Sectors? Gender Differences in the Swedish Labour Market

Sammanfattning

This study examines whether education is equally rewarded across sectors in the Swedish labour market, and to what extent gender composition influences wage outcomes. Using aggregated data from Statistics Sweden (SCB), the analysis focuses on differences in wages across education levels, sectors and gender. The empirical strategy consists of descriptive analysis, the calculation of returns to education across sectors and an OLS regression analysis for the governmental sector with focus on two fields of work. The results show that higher levels of education are associated with higher wages, consistent with human capital theory. However, the magnitude of aggregated returns to education varies across sectors and between men and women. The interaction analysis further suggests that gender wage differences vary across educational categories, indicating that the relationship between education and wages differs between men and women across fields of specialization Gender wage differences persist within similar levels of education, although they are generally smaller in the government sector compared to the private sector. Furthermore, the findings suggest that sectors with different gender compositions exhibit variations in wage structures and returns to education. Overall, the results indicate that education is not rewarded uniformly across the labour market, and that structural factors such as sector and gender composition play an important role in explaining wage inequality.