Yes: > We must, unfortunately, restrict our sample to men for both practical and substantive reasons. Most centrally, the large majority of female earners are

Yes: > We must, unfortunately, restrict our sample to men for both practical and substantive reasons. Most centrally, the large majority of female earners are categorized as “spouse” in the PSID, and spouse union membership only began to be collected consistently in 1979. We thus cannot measure union membership for approximately a quarter of the potential career span for women. > Furthermore, we run into multilayered selectivity issues for female employment and unionization in the cohort under study. In 1969, fewer than half of prime-aged women participated in the labor market. Many women in this cohort also faced significant normative pressure and discrimination following childbirth to remain at home, resulting in larger proportions of women in this cohort exiting the labor market (Goldin and Mitchell 2017). Labor unions in this period were male-dominated and had sexist practices of recruitment and upward advancement, particularly among the membership core and leadership structure (Lichenstein 2012). As a result, unionized women working in consistent, full-time employment were a select group overcoming a vast institutional system of gender discrimination, biasing comparisons that can be made across non-union and non-working women.