Seriously Curious by Tom Standage

Author:Tom Standage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

The roots of the gender pay gap lie in childhood

It is well known that parenthood tends to hurt women’s careers but not men’s. Numerous studies have shown that having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”. A wide range of individual decisions account for this effect. Some women work fewer hours, or not at all, when their children are young. Others switch to jobs that are more family-friendly but lower-paid. There is substantial variation in the size of the earnings decline, ranging from zero all the way up to 100% (in the case of women who stop working altogether).

Yet there is an intriguing factor that helps to predict whether the reduction in a woman’s income due to having children is likely to be large or small: the choices made during her childhood by her own mother. A study by Henrik Kleven from Princeton University, Camille Landais from the London School of Economics and Jakob Sogaard from the Danish Ministry of Taxation analysed administrative data from Denmark, which covers the country’s entire population for generations, to quantify the child penalty, defined as the amount by which women’s earnings fell behind those of men after having children. From 1980 to 2013, the long-run child penalty was found to be about 20%. Because the overall pay gap between men and women shrank during that period, by 2013 the child penalty accounted for almost the entire remaining difference in the sexes’ incomes. Before becoming mothers, women’s compensation more or less keeps pace with men’s. Only once they have children do their economic trajectories begin to lag.

Like mother, like daughter

April–May 2015

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