"In this paper, a longitudinal data set covering 5% of all Danish wage earners over a 9-year period is used to shed light on the observed wage differentials due to gender. A human capital model is used to isolate the effects of changes in experience, schooling and unemployment, together with other factors.... Despite the observation from macro statistics that women have had the highest observed increases in wage rates, the models show that this increase is mainly due to an improvement in their background characteristics and that men still receive a higher return to their characteristics. The main difference between genders appears to be that female workers do not, in general, get any return to their experience. The estimates also show negative effects on the wage rate of previous spells of unemployment."