The gender pay gap is not a myth, it's math
But it's mostly not a discrimination story, it's a parenting story
As I’m out and about talking about boys and men, I’m often asked a question along the lines of “well, why is there still such a big gender pay gap, then?” It’s a good question. And I provide what I think it a pretty good answer, on pages 23-29 of my book Of Boys and Men. (Did I mention I’d written a book?)
If you’re more of a video kind of person, do check out my latest for Big Think, an explainer on the real causes of the gender pay gap:
But let me set out the basic argument here too.
Mind the gap instinct
When I hire a new research assistant, I ask them to read two books. The first is How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark, an excellent guide to sharp communication in a world of blogs and tweets. The other is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World— and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, who is something of a hero to me. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a Swedish physician who became obsessed with statistical illiteracy. In Factfulness, he describes various biases, including the “straight line instinct,” an assumption that a historical trend line will continue unaltered into the future; the “negativity instinct,” which is a tendency to think things are likely getting worse; and the “gap instinct,” which is a “basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between.”
As Rosling puts it:
We love to dichotomize.
The gap instinct leads to two errors of perception. First, we fail to see how much overlap there is between two groups. Second, we fail to see the bigger gaps that typically exist within groups, rather than between them. The gender pay gap is a case in point. A woman at the middle of the female wage distribution (for full-time, year-round workers) earns 82% as much as a man at the middle of the male one.
When we hear about this gap, the thought that naturally gets generated is “women earn less than men.” But in fact, the distribution of women’s wages looks strikingly similar to the distribution of men’s wages, and a lot more similar today than just a few decades ago. The figure below, from the book, shows the wage distribution for men and women (working full time) in 1979 and in 2019:
As you can see, the distributions now overlap much more tightly. In fact, 40% of women now earn more than the typical man, up from just 13% in 1979. The closeness of the male and female wage distributions is of course stupendously good news on the gender equality front.
But, still, there’s a gap
So, what is causing the remaining gap? The answer to this question matters a lot, especially when it comes to potential solutions.
The basic facts are not in dispute. As I have already said, the typical (i.e., median) full-time female worker earns about 82% as much as the typical man. The real disagreement is not over whether the typical woman earns less than the typical man, but why.
There is certainly little evidence that women are paid less than men for doing the same work in the same way. Women are paid less because they do different work, or work differently, or both. But, of course, that is not the end of the story. Women may earn less because they occupy fewer senior positions, but that fact itself may be the result of institutional sexism. Similarly, it is true that women tend to be more clustered than men in lower-paying occupations and industries, which explains perhaps a third of the pay gap. But that may reflect socialized gender roles, not least in terms of family responsibilities, or a devaluation of work that is done by women, or both. In any case, while there is a pay gap between occupations, there is as big a gender pay gap within occupations.
The pay gap is a parenting gap
The one-word explanation for the pay gap is: children. Among young adults, especially if they are childless, the pay gap has essentially disappeared. “There’s remarkable evidence that earnings for men and women move in sync up until the birth of a couple’s first child,” says economist Marianne Bertrand. “This is when women lose and they never recover.” Here’s a couple of charts from Henrik Kleven and colleagues that makes the point rather dramatically:
The earnings trajectory for women who do not have children looks similar to that for men. The one for mothers does not. The more children women have, the further behind they fall in terms of both employment and earnings. But for men, if anything becoming a father increases wages and hours worked.
Some of the best proof that the gender pay gap is mostly a parenting pay gap comes from innovative studies in Sweden and Norway comparing new mothers in same-sex relationships with those in heterosexual relationships. Ylva Moberg shows that the impact on earnings for the birth mother is almost identical in both family types. Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones. Over time, the inequality seems to balance out in the lesbian couple if they have more than one child, as each takes their turn at being the birth mother. For heterosexual couples, by contrast, the gap gets wider with each child.
A study of bus and train drivers working for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel, a duo of Harvard economists, provides some strong evidence here too. Women account for 30% of the drivers, and on average earn $0.89 for every dollar earned by their male peers. By focusing on men and women doing the same job for the same employer, Bolotnyy and Emanuel can tease out the various factors contributing to wage differ- ences. They conclude that:
The pay gap can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices.
The men were twice as likely to work overtime (which pays extra), even at short notice. They also took fewer hours of unpaid leave, and so on. Among train drivers with children, the gaps were even wider. Fathers wanted even more overtime pay; mothers wanted more time off.
For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite. For most men, it barely makes a dent.
Ideology trumps the facts
As with so many issues, the gender gap gap is looked at through existing ideological lens rather than empirically. Conservatives insist that the pay gap is a “myth”, in the sense that it is largely explained by factors like occupation and parenting. Almost half of men in the U.S. (46%) now agree that the pay gap “is made up to serve a political purpose,” rather than being a “legitimate issue”.
On the other side, progressives insist that the pay gap is the result of sexist discrimination. The impression is given that the cause of the gender wage gap is that women are paid less for doing the same or similar work as men.
This is not the case, as every labor market economist knows. But strikingly, people and especially women with higher someone’s level of education are more likely to think that direct discrimination is the main cause of the gender pay gap. (To my frustration, even though I can literally see the numbers in my head, I think from Gallup, I can’t lay my hands on the survey. So for now you’ll have to trust me on this one, or even better help me find the data).
That’s clearly an ideological effect, and a useful reminder that educational level is not a reliable predictor of the accuracy of a person’s views on a particular topic. Especially if it a culture-war topic.
Progress will take more work now
None of this should be read as suggesting that there’s less to do on the gender pay gap. On the contrary: the fact that the gap is now the result of deeper factors like family and occupation, of structure rather than sexism, means that we have to work harder still to make progress.
That means reducing the sharpness of the trade off between raising a family and pursuing a career (paging Claudia Goldin), as well as increasing the share of childrearing undertaken by men.
More paid leave, anyone?
Men and women have different access to the base of Maslow’s hierachy of needs: Physiological needs herewithin “The need for reproduction”.
A man needs to convince a woman to have children with him to fulfil this basic need. Thus, men must provide what women wants in competition with other men. If women wants men “who brings something to the table”, men must comply.
Men complies by taking on dangerous or strenuous jobs with high fatality rates or unpleasant working conditions. Not because they are masochists but because that’s how they can get something to show for themselves.
So, with Darwin’s knife at their throat, is it suprising that men always make the choices leading to higher pay?
Not discussed here are two linked issues.
The first is whether the gender pay gap is coerced or the manifestation of a legitimate preference. The second is the compensating transfers of income from men to women and children.
Its an obvious implication that figures showing men work more having had children, point to them operating in the income provider role. So that extra income is being earned to meet additional demands for the benefit of the mother and child. This transfer at least partly compensates the mother for her income loss.
Do mothers want to work more, or are they coerced by their partners, their employers or the labour market into the role of primary carer and so moving, to some extent, to part time work? Do fathers want more a more significant caring role but are coerced by economic necessities? It might well be said that the optimal parenting arrangement is both parents working to some extent part time and thereby both having sufficient time to have meaningful work AND full engagement with their children. Why is that not the predominant arrangement?
Income demands constrain that choice. Very few families can meet their living standard expectations on the equivalent of a single income. The labour market is such that many parents must work as much as they can within the constraints of providing care.
Parents role play. Its a biological effect that new mothers tend to assert themselves as primary carers. The fathers role is commonly consequential, as earner and secondary carer. Difficult as those roles often are, they are positions which quickly become entrenched and resistant to change.
Clearly some mothers would want to work more if there were more affordable day care. But which choice here is coerced, to work or to care for your child? The decision to work full time and place a child in long hours of day care may be coerced by insufficient family income. It is easy to see that part time work will often be an optimal choice for those families whose overall family income is enough and it will be the established primary carer who will have the benefit of that optimisation.
The contemporary gender pay gap is mainly a consequence of parenting arrangements that are easily recognisable. But the effect of time constraints in single parenthood (families that are overwhelmingly mother led) forcing the parent into part time work at best, will also be significant.
Families with mother and father together are typically better off than single parent families due to the sharing of the fathers surplus earnings. This transfer is strangely omitted from the narrative, except when non payment is the problem.
What then is behind this focus on equality of paid work in preference to spending time caring for your child?
Is there as RR hints, a misunderstanding that the pay gap indicates pay discrimination? Is it as Mary Harrington has written, the erasure of motherhood by some feminist ideologies. Is it an objection to the perceived economic dependency of a mother on her partner (dependency could also be called support - do mothers in fact reject or welcome that support? ) Or is it yet another manifestation of the long held suspicion voiced in many quarters that modern free market capitalist countries are not very child friendly?
It is far from clear that within the innumerable constraints on life that parenting imposes, and there are of course more the more children you have, couples are doing anything other than optimising their preferences. In democratic societies there should be an open discussion about what change we want rather than a tendentious and misleading use of statistics that generate a false narrative of pay discrimination.