Understanding the gender pay gap between and within occupations in Germany: What role do individual job tasks play?

We analyse whether gender differences in individual job tasks explain part of the gender pay gap between and within occupations. Theoretically, we combine the economic task-based approach with sociological considerations of gender essentialism and male primacy to discuss systematic variation in the demand for and remuneration of job tasks. Results of hybrid models and Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions reveal that women perform lower-paid job tasks more often than men do, which contributes to the gender pay gap between and within occupations. However, not all tasks performed by women pay less, pointing towards an interdependence between skill-biased technological change and gender-essentialist task selection.