News — WASHINGTON, DC—In the United States, employed women earn approximately 83 cents for every dollar that men earn, although the size of this gap differs by race and ethnicity. Much of the public discourse around the “gender wage gap” focuses on the role of parenthood and the idea that the gender wage gap is essentially a penalty for bearing children.
This idea has some support in evidence on family wage gaps: mothers earn less than childless women, fathers earn more than childless men, and the difference between wages of married and unmarried workers is greater for men than it is for women. Despite all of the academic and policy attention to family wage gaps, it’s not yet known how much of the gender wage gap is tied to these family wage gaps.
In their new study, “Is the Gender Wage Gap Really a Family Wage Gap in Disguise?,” appearing in the December 2023 issue of , authors , Indiana University; , Cornell University; and , Cornell University, investigate the relationship between family and gender wage gaps--looking at the full labor market, and also separately looking at Black, Hispanic, and White workers.
The authors’ analysis is based on the nationally representative data from the 2018 Survey of Income and Program Participation, which is collected by the U.S. Census. The sample includes 23,765 wage and salary workers, ages 18 to 67, who had non-zero earnings.
The authors found that found that 33 percent of the gender wage gap is associated with gender differences in the wage gaps between married and never-married workers, and 29 percent is associated with gender differences in the wage gap between parents and childless workers. Altogether, the family wage gaps are associated with approximately two thirds of the gender wage gap. In models that adjust for worker demographic and human capital attributes, job attributes, and occupation, family wage gaps are the second-largest contributors to gender wage gaps, behind occupation, and contribute 19 percent of the total gender wage gap.
These results suggest that “the strong relationship between family wage gaps and the gender wage gap, long assumed in the family and gender wage gap literatures, is on the mark.” However, the authors offer two important caveats to the “family wage gap in disguise” story.
First, a substantial 36 percent of the gender wage gap is not associated with family wage gaps. They find a 10 percent gender gap among never-married childless workers, which is smaller than the 23 percent gap among married parents but still substantial. Second, the relationship between family wages and the gender wage gap is weaker and more complicated for Black and Hispanic workers than for White workers.
Although the study does not say how marriage or parenthood affect gender gaps in wages, it does open up important questions for future research: What accounts for the wage gaps between childless men and women, and between never-married men and women? To what extent racial differences in the social meaning of motherhood account for the observed racial differences in the relationship between family wage gaps and gender wage gaps? What explains the gender-differentiated access to marriage and its wage consequences among Black and Hispanic workers?
For employers and policy makers, the study implies that efforts to support parents, and especially mothers, in the workplace can chip away at gender gaps in pay. However, it is not likely to eliminate them. As the authors note, “these results caution against focusing solely on the wage gap between ‘mothers and others.”
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The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a nonprofit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is ASA's flagship journal.
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