This paper documents the gender gap in performance among high-skilled professionals in the United States. On the basis of widely used performance measures in law firms, we find that male lawyers bill 10 percent more hours and bring in more than twice as much new client revenue as female lawyers. The differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers’ earnings and subsequent promotion.

In some OECD countries the male and female unemployment rates are very similar but in others (notably the Mediterranean countries) the female unemployment rate is much higher than the male. Explaining these cross‐country differences is the subject of this article. We show that, in countries where there is a large gender gap in unemployment rates, there is a gender gap in both flows from employment into unemployment and from unemployment into employment. We conclude that differences in human capital accumulation between men and women interacted with labor market institutions is an important part of the explanation.