7/24/2023 0 Comments Time out for women 2018 you tubeBut in practice, Danish women take off the vast majority of time after the birth of a child. In theory, Danish policy does allow parents to split up their leave. Men, however, see their careers go on largely unchanged, with dads and non-parents having roughly equal earnings over the next decades.ĭenmark’s generous leave policy might exacerbate the gender wage gap by pulling women out of the workforce for longer periods of time. These are jobs that typically offer “flexible working hours, leave days when having sick children, and a favorable view on long parental leaves.” Ten years after childbirth, women have a 10 percentage point higher probability of public sector employment than men. He finds that women start to gravitate toward different jobs after the birth of a child, ones with fewer hours and lower wages. Much of Kleven’s paper is designed to untangle what exactly happens after women have children that leads to this wage gap. In Denmark, childbearing creates a 20 percent gender wage gap But the professional penalty women face for having children is stubborn, and it isn’t going anywhere. Historical drivers of the gender wage gap - a lack of education among women, for example - are disappearing. All the other sources are declining, but the child effect sticks, and that ends up taking over as the key driver.” “The one thing which is not changing is the effect of children,” Kleven says of the gender wage gap. Men were earning 60 percent more than women. Men also worked, on average, a few more weekly hours and had a bit more prior experience as they entered the workforce.īut nine years into their careers, women saw their salaries rise to an average of $250,000 - while men’s salaries averaged out at $400,000. It found that women earned an average salary of $115,000 right out of graduate school, while men earned $130,000. It examined the earnings of thousands of business school graduates. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin has found that the gender wage gap in America is the largest for women in their 30s - in other words, their prime, childbearing years.Ī 2009 study led by University of Chicago’s Marianne Bertrand echoes that conclusion. Kleven’s research uses Danish data, but similar studies conducted in the United States have found similar results. This chart, for example, shows vastly different earnings trajectories for women who have children versus those who do not become mothers.Ĭhildbearing, the study estimates, accounts for 80 percent of the gender wage gap in Denmark. Studies conducted in the United States have come to this finding - and Kleven’s new research does too. His study is among a growing body of research that suggests what we often think of as a gender pay gap is more accurately discussed as a childbearing pay gap or motherhood penalty.Ĭhildless women have earnings that are quite similar to men’s salaries, while mothers experience a significant wage gap. The cumulative effect is huge: Women end up earning 20 percent less than their male counterparts over the course of their career. Kleven finds a sharp decline in women’s earnings after the birth of their first child - with no comparable salary drop for men. Yet Denmark has a gender wage gap nearly the same size as that of the United States, a country where women are not guaranteed paid maternity leave and child care increasingly costs more than rent. The government offers public nursery care for children under 3 at the equivalent of $737 a month - a fraction of typical costs in the United States. This is a country that offers new parents an entire year of paid leave after the birth of a child. He uses data from a country with one of the world’s most robust social safety nets: Denmark. The research comes from Henrik Kleven, an economist at Princeton University. Others point to women selecting into certain fields that pay less - while still others cite gaps in the types of education men and women pursue.Īn important new study makes a compelling case for another explanation: The gender wage gap is mostly a penalty for bearing children. Some think the wage gap is the result of gender discrimination, an economy that doesn’t believe women can perform as well as men. The big debate in this space isn’t whether a gender wage gap exists - it’s why the gap exists. Look across the world and you won’t find a country where men and women have equal earnings. It is true in Denmark (which has a 15 percent wage gap). It is true in Japan (women there earn 73 percent of what a man does). This is true in the United States (where women earn about 79 percent of what men do). It is a persistent fact that - across time and across countries - women earn less money than men.
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