On Using Pareto Distributions for Measuring Top-Income Gender Disparities

Atkinson et al. (2018) propose a measure of the glass ceiling exploiting thattop incomes are approximately Pareto distributed. We clarify how this glass-ceilingcoefficient describes the increasing scarcity of women further up in the income dis-tribution and show how it relates to the top-income gender gap. If interpreting topincome gender differences as caused by a female-specific income tax, the gender gapand glass-ceiling coefficient measure its level and progressivity, respectively. UsingDanish data on earnings, we show that the top gender gap and the glass-ceilingcoefficient evolves differently across time, the life cycle, and educational groups.