In 2011, a hundred thousand people poured into the streets of Madison, Wisconsin to oppose newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker’s severe budget repair bill, which imposed devastating austerity and cratered the state’s public sector unions. Approaching a decade since the legislation’s passage, we’re now able to assess the grim legacy of Walker’s anti-worker crusade, which reduced total union membership in Wisconsin by 31 percent between 2013 and 2018.

One aspect of this legacy is the emergence of a gender pay gap among teachers. A new working paper by Barbara Biasi and Heather Sarsons conducted for the National Bureau of Economic Research, titled “Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap,” finds that there is now a discrepancy in male and female teachers’ pay in Wisconsin, whereas before Walker’s legislation there was none.

Walker’s aggressive budget repair bill was one of the most belligerent assaults on unions in living memory. There is a special significance to the fact that it occurred in Wisconsin, long a bastion of public sector unionism and the first state to allow teachers to unionize in 1959. The legislation was so brutal that it earned Walker a reputation as “one of the most anti-union, hard-line conservative governors in America” and “perhaps the most anti-worker politician in the whole country.”