In this work, we analyze wage careers of women in Austria. We
identify groups of female employees with similar patterns in their earnings
development. Covariates such as e.g. the age of entry, the number of children
or maternity leave help to detect these groups. We find three different types
of female employees: (1) “high-wage mums”, women with high income and
one or two children, (2) “low-wage mums”, women with low income and
‘many’ children and (3) “childless careers”, women who climb up the career
ladder and do not have children.
We use a Markov chain clustering approach to find groups in the discretevalued
time series of income states. Additional covariates are included when
modeling group membership via a multinomial logit model.