Abstract
We assess how changes in the social organization and compensation of work hours over the last three decades are associated with changes in wage differentials among mothers, fathers, childless women, and childless 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 fatherhood wage premium. These findings offer important clues into why gender and family wage differentials still persist.
- gender inequality
- family wage gap
- gender wage gap
- motherhood wage penalty
- fatherhood wage premium
- work hours
- long work hours
- overwork
- Copyright © 2016 by Russell Sage Foundation. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Reproduction by the United States Government in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose. We thank Martha Bailey, Sheldon Danziger, Tom DiPrete, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Direct correspondence to: Kim Weeden at kw74{at}cornell.edu, 323 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853; Youngjoo Cha at cha5{at}indiana.edu; and Mauricio Bucca at mebucca{at}gmail.com. A one-click Stata replication package for the analyses in this paper is available at www.kimweeden.com/manuscripts.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.