Ronald Oaxaca on gender pay discrimination and the 1973 lawsuit against AT&T

Ronald Oaxaca, the McClellan Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Arizona, joins the podcast to talk to Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter about his research on gender wage gaps and using research to solve real-world problems.

In this episode, Oaxaca and Ashenfelter discuss:

• Why Oaxaca decided to pursue labor economics as a student at Princeton.
• The impact Princeton's Albert "Al" Rees had on Oaxaca's academic trajectory and Oaxaca's thesis on gender wage gaps.
• The origins of the “Oaxaca Command”—a now widely-used decomposition procedure on Stata—that Oaxaca originally developed for the Princeton mainframe while working on his dissertation.
• Oaxaca's experience as an expert witness in a 1973 EEOC gender discrimination case against AT&T.
• The state of pay discrimination today, and what the U.S. Women's Soccer equal pay lawsuit teaches us about what still needs to change.

Oaxaca earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1971. He was a student of Albert Rees. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced as Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section) celebrates its 100th anniversary—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.