As our research continues, this picture continues to come into focus. We are slowly gaining a clearer picture of how the gender pay gap evolves over the course of our lives. For example, how much of the gap is contributed by dual-career considerations, where a family has to optimize around the primary breadwinner? Can public policies help to better share the burden among working spouses? An improved understanding might help us determine whether policies such as father quotas in parental leave might be part of a solution. There are still more questions to be answered before we can fully understand the causes of the gender pay gap, and how policies might help close it. This happens as women increase their work effort relative to men once their children leave home. For example, among more recent generations of college-educated women, the gap starts shrinking when they reach their late 50s. Things begin to turn around for women, though, once they reach their late 40s and 50s: the pay gap begins to narrow again.
And when women become mothers, they are more likely to move into part-time positions, take time off, and work fewer hours than men, even in full-time work. Much of the widening of the gap comes from married women: their earnings grow much more slowly with age and they see little benefit from job-hopping compared with men and unmarried women. Less than a third of this gap is caused by differences between the jobs in which men and women work, though women are certainly overrepresented in lower-paying sectors and occupations such as teaching, nursing, and social work - the usual “pink-collar” jobs. By the time college grads reach their peak earnings, men earn on average 55 percent more than women. We now know that male and female college grads start their careers earning nearly the same salaries, but end up with a substantial gap by age 45. Globally, the gap isn’t expected to close for another 257 years.īut we are learning that the story of the gender pay gap is a complex one.
The gender pay gap has slowly narrowed over time, but hasn’t budged much over the past 15 years. Women on average earn $0.82 for each dollar earned by a man black women earn $0.62, Native American women earn $0.57, and Latina women earn $0.54. Equal Pay Day for black women is August 13, for Native American women it’s October 1, and for Latina women it’s October 29. must work in order to earn what the average man in the U.S. Today is Equal Pay Day, a day that symbolizes how far into the year the average woman in the U.S.
My research shows that this is the point in women’s lives at which the gender pay gap widens.įast-forward 15 years: the woman’s children are growing up and will soon be headed off to college, and she is eager to ramp her career back up. She decides to cut back her hours (and thus her pay) in order to spend more time with her children. In her early 30s, she has a baby, and then another baby in her mid-30s. Her husband gets a job offer in a new city, they move, and she takes a slightly lower-paying job. She gets promoted a few times, her salary increases, and in her late 20s, she gets married. A woman graduates from college and starts her first job, earning about the same as the male colleague who sits next to her.
0 kommentar(er)
