In this paper we present a comparative analysis of earnings inequality during the 1980s among prime age men who headed households and worked year‐round, full‐time from five industrialized countries‐Canada, Sweden, Australia, West Germany, and the United States. The data were obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database, a multinational collection of microdata sets from various countries which have been assembled for the primary purpose of making cross‐national comparisons of economic and social well‐being. The results of the comparison indicated that during the mid‐1980s, the United States had the most unequal distribution of earnings and Sweden the least unequal. Between the early 1980s and mid‐1980s, however, the earnings distributions in all five countries showed evidence of becoming more unequal, especially in the United States, Canad