A new study revealed that a decline in the number of children among U.S. employees has played a significant role in reducing the gender pay gap.
Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics Director Alexandra Killewald and Harvard University PhD Candidate in Sociology Nino José Cricco published their findings in Social Forces in November.
“Having children leads to wage losses for women but wage gains for men,” explained Killewald, also Professor of Sociology in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Robert F. Schoeni Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. “As a result, parenthood tends to widen gender pay gaps. But research on the narrowing gender pay gap has mostly focused on women’s gains in education and work experience, overlooking the impact of changing fertility rates.”
Killewald and Cricco’s study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze how the overall decrease in family size over nearly four decades has influenced the pay gap between men and women.
Key findings include:
- Even after controlling for variables such as education and job characteristics, reduced fertility explained 8% of the reduction in the gender pay gap 1980-2018—half as much as educational improvements and a quarter as much as increased full-time work experience and job tenure combined.
- The fastest decline in fertility rates occurred during the 1980s, with the pace slowing in subsequent decades. This slowdown, combined with ongoing differences in how parenthood affects women and men’s wages, partially explains why progress toward pay equality has stagnated in recent years.
“This 8% is even a conservative estimate,” Cricco said. “When we consider that motherhood shapes women’s wages in part by limiting their work experience and job tenure, the effect is larger.”
“This research underscores that, without reducing the negative consequences of motherhood for women’s pay, parenthood is likely to put a brake on future progress toward pay parity,” Killewald said. “Policies aimed at promoting gender pay parity must consider how to support parents in combining work and caregiving. This might include family-focused policies, like subsidizing child care. Or it might include labor policies and caps on work hours. If fewer men engaged in long work hours, it might be more feasible for two parents to be employed full time.”
For more information, access the full study: myumi.ch/DrM2Q.
