On average, wage income follows the professional life cycle: it increases rapidly at the start of a career, then moves more slowly and decreases slightly at the end. While this trend is more or less the same for all employees, it varies in scale from one employee to another. The increase in wage income is on average very fast for employees who were least well-paid in the previous five years, slow for employees with intermediate pay, and fast for employees with the highest pay. The dispersion in these variations, which is interpreted for employees as a “wage risk”, is wider at the extremes of this salary scale; dispersion is also always stronger for the youngest employees. Women's wage income grew more slowly on average than that of men. At the bottom of the salary scale, this relates to differences in working time; at the top, it may represent a glass ceiling. These two phenomena contribute to the fact that fewer women are present at high wage income levels. Changes in wage income occur more quickly and are less dispersed for employees in the public sector than the private sector