Long Work Hours, Part-Time Work, and Trends in the Gender Gap in Pay, the Motherhood Wage Penalty, and the Fatherhood Wage Premium
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Long Work Hours, Part-Time Work, and Trends in the Gender Gap in Pay, the Motherhood Wage Penalty, and the Fatherhood Wage Premium Kim A. Weeden, Youngjoo Cha, Mauricio Bucca RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Volume 2, Number 4, August 2016, pp. 71-102 (Article) Published by Russell Sage Foundation For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/630321 [ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 01:28 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] Trends in the Long Work Hours, Part- Time Gender Gap Work, and Trends in the Gender Gap in Pay, the Motherhood Wage Penalty, and the Fatherhood Wage Premium kim a. weeden, youngJoo cha, and mauricio bucca We assess how changes in the social organization and compensation of work hours over the last three de- cades are associated with changes in wage differentials among mothers, fathers, childless women, and child- less men. We find that large differences between gender and parental status groups in long work hours (fifty or more per week), coupled with sharply rising hourly wages for long work hours, contributed to rising gender gaps in wages (especially among parents), motherhood wage penalties, and fatherhood wage premiums. Changes in the representation of these groups in part-time work, by contrast, is associated with a decline in the gender gap in wages among parents and in the motherhood wage penalty, but an increase in the father- hood wage premium. These findings offer important clues into why gender and family wage differentials still persist. Keywords: gender inequality, family wage gap, gender wage gap, motherhood wage penalty, fatherhood wage premium, work hours, long work hours, overwork After converging relatively rapidly in the 1970s erature is that the gender gap in wages at the and 1980s, the gender gap in hourly wages aggregate level is perpetuated by persistent shrank only modestly over the next thirty-five gender differences in individual labor market years. Today, median weekly wages of full- time behaviors: whether men and women work for women are 83 percent of the median weekly pay, the occupations and industries in which wages of men, an increase of just three per- they work, and the number of hours per week centage points since 2004 (BLS 2015). This they work. These gender differences emerge in stalled convergence in the gender gap in wages the context of structural changes in the distri- has led to a large and vibrant research litera- bution of jobs with particular attributes (such ture that seeks to understand why change has as expected work hours) and in the wages as- been so slow (England 2010). sociated with these attributes, resulting in One of the key empirical insights of this lit- complex and offsetting effects on the gender Kim A. Weeden is Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of In- equality at Cornell University. Youngjoo Cha is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. Mauricio Bucca is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. We thank Martha Bailey, Sheldon Danziger, Tom DiPrete, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful com- ments on an earlier version of this paper. Direct correspondence to: Kim Weeden at [email protected], 323 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853; Youngjoo Cha at [email protected]; and Mauricio Bucca at [email protected]. A one- click Stata replication package for the analyses in this paper is available at www.kimweeden.com /manuscripts. 72 a ha lf century of change in the lives of american women gap in wages.1 For example, Youngjoo Cha and United States, the gender wage gap among Kim Weeden (2014) show that the diffusion of parents and among childless adults, and the long work hours in the United States in the family wage gap among women and among 1990s and 2000s, coupled with the persistent men. The first set of comparisons is motivated gender gap in long work hours and rising by our expectation that changes in work hours hourly compensation for long work hours, and in the hourly pay of different work hours was associated with an increase in the gender had a stronger association with the gender gap gap in wages after adjusting for other wage- in wages among parents than among childless relevant attributes. These trends largely offset adults. The second set is motivated by our ex- wage- equalizing shifts in women’s educational pectation that growth or decline in family attainment. wage gaps result from the interplay of changes A second empirical insight is that much of in the distribution of work hours among par- what appears to be a gender wage gap is better ents and childless adults and structural understood as a gender-specific family apg in changes in the hourly pay associated with pay or, as they are known in the economic and part- time work, full- time work, and long work sociological literatures, the motherhood wage hours. penalty and fatherhood wage premium: mothers We assess these expectations using nation- earn less than observationally similar childless ally representative labor force data from the women (Pal and Waldfogel, this volume; Wald- Current Population Survey (CPS). First, we fogel 1998; Budig and England 2001; Avellar briefly situate our analyses in the broader lit- and Smock 2003; Gangl and Ziefle 2009; Staff eratures on the sources of the stagnation in the and Mortimer 2012; Cooke 2014; Kahn, Garcia- gender and family gap in wages. Manglano, and Bianchi 2014), and fathers earn more than observationally similar childless Work hours and The Gender men (Pal and Waldfogel, this volume; Waldfo- WaGe Gap gel 1998; Lundberg and Rose 2000; Glauber In accounting for the slow convergence in the 2008; Killewald 2012). As in the broader gender gender gap in wages over the last two decades, literature, the research on family wage differ- gender scholars point to widespread cultural entials emphasizes wage-relevant labor market beliefs about the existence of deeply rooted and behaviors, including work hours, of parents often biologically based differences in men’s compared with childless adults. Curiously, and women’s traits and skills (Charles and however, explicit efforts to tie trends in the dis- Grusky 2004; Ridgeway 2011; Cotter, Hermsen, tribution of work hours between mothers and and Vanneman 2011). These cultural beliefs af- childless women, or between fathers and child- fect men’s and women’s labor market deci- less men, to trends in family wage gaps are rel- sions, employers’ hiring decisions, and institu- atively few and far between. Those that do typ- tional configurations such as the availability of ically emphasize shifts in the distribution of policies that would support workers who wish parents and childless adults across part-time to combine paid and unpaid labor. Because the and full- time work but ignore long work hours underlying cultural beliefs are slow to change, (see, for example, Waldfogel 1998; Pal and so the argument goes, gender differences in the Waldfogel, this volume; Buchmann and Mc- labor market behaviors that generate a gender Daniel, this volume). gap in wages are also slow to change. We bring together these two streams of One implication of this argument is that the research by describing the empirical relation- proximate sources of the gender wage gap, and ship between trends in work hours in the of stagnation in the gender wage gap, are likely 1. We realize that one cannot safely interpret the results of wage equation models based on observational data as causal, except under the implausible assumption that the observed covariates capture all wage- relevant dif- ferences between mothers and fathers, for example, or between mothers and childless women. We use the term effect sparingly. The exception is in our discussion of our decomposition models, where price change effect and quantity change effect are standard terminology (see data and methods). : trends in the gender ga P 73 to be especially pronounced among parents. mother who is available to her family at all After all, a core feature of gender essentialism hours of the day or night, is able to travel or is the belief that women naturally excel at nur- relocate to support her children’s enrichment turance, personal service, and childrearing activities, and prioritizes family over career (Charles and Grusky 2004, 19; Ridgeway and success. To be sure, fathers, childless men, and Correll 2004). This stereotype makes it likely childless women in “greedy organizations” that more mothers than fathers or childless (Coser 1967) or occupations may also experi- adults will devote a greater share of their time ence work-life conflicts, but they are often to childrearing, more difficult for mothers to more able to “pass” as ideal workers, in part avoid social sanctions if they do not curtail because employers interpret their behavior their paid work hours during their childrearing more favorably than identical behavior by years, and less likely that employers will hire mothers (Reid 2015; Correll, Benard, and Paik mothers for jobs that require stereotypically 2007; Williams 2003). As a result, the gender male- typed skills or work hours (Ridgeway and gap in long work hours among parents is likely Correll 2004). to be greater among parents than childless This prediction is supported, albeit indi- adults and, given its roots in gender essential- rectly, by the empirical literature on the proxi- ist beliefs, also more resistant to change. mate sources of the gender gap in wages. Take, Organizational scholars have also noted for example, housework, which affects the time that a growing share of jobs are organized as and energy that is available for paid labor. The part- time work, contingent work, temporary housework time gaps between mothers and fa- work, contract work, and other “nonstandard thers are larger than the gaps among all adults employment relations” that weaken any expec- (Bianchi et al.