The Invisibility of Women’s Unpaid Work in Gender Policies (original) (raw)
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The Gender Pay Gap Gender Wage Gap and the Welfare-Enhancing Role of Parental Leave Rules 4
A large body of empirical evidence documents the gender variation in labour market outcomes. A major factor that contributes to persistent gender gaps in labour market performance is women's traditional role in the household. Child-related absences from work imply that women accumulate less job experience, are more prone to career discontinuities and, hence, suffer a motherhood penalty. We highlight how the fundamental gender-driven career/family conflict faced by workers in the labour market may create a normative justification for parental leave rules as a means to enhance efficiency and alleviate the gender pay gap.
What this report finds: Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men-despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment. Too often it is assumed that this pay gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors-particularly occupational differences between women and men-are themselves often affected by gender bias. For example, by the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work-family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women's control.
Gender remains strongly associated with women’s and men’s patterns of unpaid work. The amount of time invested in unpaid work as opposed to paid work, the distribution of unpaid work time among specific tasks, and the patterns of care and responsibility are all determined to a large degree by one’s gender. Women continue to spend more time than men on housework, whether they are employed or not; they continue to do more of the work involved in caring for children and to take more responsibility for that work; and finally, women’s volunteer activities are more likely to be related to family than are men’s. There have been numerous attempts to explain the gendered patterns of time spent on housework and childcare and, although there is support for each of them, none can fully account for the gendered patterns of unpaid work time. The gender display approach offers some hope for better understanding the relationship between gender and unpaid work time, but efforts to evaluate its usefulness are necessarily indirect. That is, there is no simple way to determine the extent to which unpaid work time is an expression of gender; we can only determine whether a particular pattern is consistent with the gender display model. It remains clear that the nature of women’s and men’s participation in housework, childcare and volunteer work are different and that changes in women’s labor force participation are not sufficient to eliminate gender differences in unpaid work activities.
Gender Differentiation in Paid and Unpaid Work during the Transition to Parenthood
Sociology Compass, 2015
The transition to parenthood may be especially difficult because relationships need to be largely reorganized to meet demanding new challenges. For scholars interested in gender inequality, the transition to parenthood is a critical time in which gender differentiation is generated by both economic and cultural forces. Although newly married childless couples tend to share both paid and unpaid labor rather equally, when men and women become parents, their patterns become increasingly differentiated by gender. Cultural beliefs that emphasize mothers as the primary parent and fathers as secondary reinforce unequal patterns in housework and childcare. Time availability models, bargaining perspectives, and gender theories all have been used to explain these patterns. Some changes that could help ease the transition to parenthood include expanding US parental leave policies, improving available childcare, adding flexible work policies, and offering more couples-focused intervention programs. Although much is known about the topic, more research is needed for the literature to reflect the new generation of global and diverse parents.
Canadian Parliamentary Review, 2021
The labor force participation of women has increased substantially since the 1960s. At the same time, the gender earnings gap has declined from about 40 percent in the late 1960s to less than 28 percent in the early 1990s and has stopped converging since.1 Much of the gender earnings gap is explained by gender differences in labor force attachment and accumulated labor market experience. In particular, the gender earnings gap increases with age as the experience gap increases.2 One explanation for the remaining gender earnings gap is that many jobs disproportionately reward working long hours.3 In many jobs, the pay is nonlinear in hours worked and penalizes workers who choose to work fewer hours. This reward structure tends to affect women of childbearing years disproportionately and also affects their occupational choices. Furthermore, in most occupations, the representation of women at the top-paying jobs is low—even if at lower levels there are many women.4 This article document...
Where Are We in the Economics of Gender?: The Gender Pay Gap
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Empirical research on gender pay gaps has traditionally focused on the role of gender-specific factors, particulmly gender differences in qualifications and differences in the treatment of otherwise equally qualified male and female workers (i.e., labor market discrimination). This paper explores the determinants of the gender pay gap and argues for the importance of an additional factor, wage structure, the array of prices set for labor market skills and the rewards received for employment in favored sectors. Drawing on joint work with Lawrence Kahn, I illustrate the impact of wage structure by presenting empirical results analyzing its effect on international differences in the gender gap and trends over time in the gender differential in the U.S.