Publication type
Report
Series
IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities
Authors
Publication date
March 15, 2021
Summary:
Gender gaps in employment, working hours and wages open up in earnest after workers become parents. At this point, far more mothers than fathers stop paid work or switch to part-time work while taking on the majority of the childcare. This not only results in an instantaneous, mechanical change in the relative personal incomes of mothers and fathers; in slowing the rate at which mothers accumulate career experience relative to fathers, it also has long-lasting, cumulative impacts on the amounts they can earn per hour well into the future. Hence, understanding gender pay gaps hinges crucially on understanding the drivers of changes in working patterns within heterosexual couples upon the arrival of children.
One common claim is that these changes have their roots in (smaller) gender gaps that exist pre-childbirth: perhaps families are maximising their total income while looking after their children, and since – on average – men already have slightly higher hourly wages than women before becoming parents, it makes sense for couples to prioritise men’s paid work. This is an important hypothesis: if true, it would imply that the focus for addressing gender gaps in pay should lie largely outside of what happens when people have children – since differences in career trajectories at that point would effectively only be the result of (smaller) differences that were already present beforehand. If false, then instead it makes sense to focus on understanding what happens as families are formed.
In this note, we investigate the evidence, and find no evidence for this hypothesis: the large decline in women’s paid work after childbirth cannot, in general, be explained by couples prioritising the paid work of the higher-wage parent. Put most simply, this is because women are always more likely to stop working after parenthood, regardless of whether or not they were the highest earner, and because among those who remain in paid work we see very similar changes in hours of paid work for mothers and fathers regardless of their relative wages before childbirth. Even in families where the mother had a higher wage than the father before the first child arrived, fathers’ working patterns are largely unaffected by childbirth whereas mothers reduce their hours of paid work substantially. We supplement this evidence with recent evidence from the COVID-19 crisis, which leads to a similar conclusion: additional childcare needs were met disproportionately by mothers, regardless of whether the mother earned more than the father before the crisis.
This short report is part of the ongoing IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities (an IFS initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation) which will, among many other things, include in-depth studies of the evidence on gender inequalities and how to address them.
Subjects
Link
https://www.ifs.org.uk/inequality/the-careers-and-time-use-of-mothers-and-fathers/
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