The Economic Costs of Men's Long Work Hours for Women: Evidence on the Gender Wage Earnings Gap from Australia and Germany

Women's earnings inequality persists, despite policy efforts to reduce discrimination and gender bias. Gender gaps in earnings, however, are a function of hours worked as well as wage rates, and reflect gendered short and long work hour patterns. Within households, how partners exchange time is a crucial driver of hours worked yet this is rarely incorporated into analysis of gender earning gaps. Using a two-stage instrumental variable Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition we model earnings gaps as a function of own and partner hours on and off the job. This enables us to estimate what the gender gap in hours and earnings would look like without a gendered time ‘subsidy’ or ‘borrowing’ in the home. We studied dual-earner households in two countries, Australia and Germany, finding a weekly earnings gap of AUD$536 and €400. This was accompanied by a weekly work hour gap of 12 hours in Australia and 13 in Germany. When we accounted for the influence of partner’s hours (paid or unpaid), work hour gaps reduce to 5.1 hours in Australian households (58% reduction), and to 6.9 hours in German (47% reduction). In effect, women would work 3 to 4 hours more each week, and men’s long hours would reduce, narrowing the gender earnings gaps by 43% in Australia and 25% in Germany, if time ‘subsidies’ in the home were eliminated. Our analysis reveals the economic cost to women long work hour cultures impose. JEL codes: J16, J21, J22, J31

Do menstrual problems explain gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings?: Evidence from the National Health Interview Survey

We explore the determinants of the gender gap in income earnings in five Sub-Saharan countries: the Republic of Congo, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. We show that first, self-employment tends to provide marginally lower average income (with the exception of Ghana and men in Rwanda) and much higher variability in income compared to wage work. Women on average earn less than men both when they are self-employed and in wage employment but also have less volatile earnings. Using the quantile decomposition methods developed in Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2007), we find that the dierences in observable choices and endowments explain the gender gap in earning for the self-employed that earn the least while the gap for the most successful male and female entrepreneurs is largely driven by dierences in returns to observable covariates in the majority of the countries. These results suggest a glass ceiling eect, wherein a large portion of the income gaps between high-earning men and women cannot be explained by observable characteristics. We conclude by looking at the variables that account for a larger portion of the gender gap explained by observable characteristics and find that hours of work and industry explain a higher fraction compared to standard human capital and demographic factors such as age and education.

Changes in women's hours of market work: The role of returns to experience

Contrary to the widely held belief that women's earnings rose relative to men's during World War II because of women's unprecedented movement into heavy manufacturing industries, the author of this study finds that the national all-industry earnings of women during the war fell compared to those of men. In Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New York, the relative weekly and annual earnings of female manufacturing workers rose, but at a rate below that of the long-term trend. Overall, the decline in women's weekly and annual earnings compared to men's probably resulted from the relative increase in men's hours worked—a result of state protective legislation that limited women's hours of work.

In this article, we examine the relationship between market transition and gender gap in earnings in urban China. We analyze change in the gender gap in human capital, political capital, labor-force placement, and family structure; change in the amount of monetary return to these determinants; and the changing significance of these sources of influence. We do so by analyzing two national samples from the 1988 and 1995 Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) and city-level data for 1995. We found no longitudinal change nor city-level variation in the gender gap in earnings. Despite this stability, the proportion of the gender gap in earnings attributable to education and occupational segregation increased over time. This change is disproportional, occurring largely only in the most marketized cities. In these highly marketized cities, the significance of market-related mechanisms — education and occupation and industry-placement — has increased, while the contribution of redistribution-related mechanisms — affiliation with the state sector, party membership, and seniority — has decreased. These changes indicate that the Chinese market transition is a nonlinear, cumulative process.

Three years into the COVID‐19 pandemic, this article considers the longer‐lasting economic impacts on the Australian workforce through a gender lens. Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, it analyses changes in employment, earnings and educational participation relative to the pre‐pandemic trends that were predicted to have otherwise occurred. Despite women's employment moving back towards pre‐pandemic levels more rapidly than men's, the pandemic also saw a widening of the gender gap in earnings and a larger fall in women's educational participation. This paper highlights the need for ongoing monitoring of labour market indicators through a gender lens to inform more responsive policy design.

In this article, we examine the effects of time spent in household labor on the gender gap in earnings. We identify that part of the gender gap in earnings directly attributable to women's greater household labor time. After controlling for years of work experience, hours worked per week, occupation, industry, union membership, and education, we find that household labor time can directly account for 8.2 percent of the gender gap in earnings. In addition to the direct effect of women's household responsibilities on earnings, they also may affect occupational location, work experience, and number of hours worked per week, and through these variables, their earnings. These findings indicate that we cannot truly understand women's earnings relative to those of men without considering the impact of their unpaid labor on their paid work.

Purpose – This paper aims to explore gender differences in terms of self-employment for US Millennials, relating them to working from home as well as other factors. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a population-based survey, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which allows to compare home-based vs non-home-based self-employed women and men on a wide variety of characteristics. Descriptive analyses reveal the unconditional relationships between the covariates of interest, and the authors use ordinary least squares regression to reveal the conditional correlations between working from home and earnings for both women and men. Findings – The authors find that working from home is highly negatively correlated with earnings for women, but not for men, and that working from home may trump the other characteristics typically associated with lower earnings. Research limitations/implications – The regression subsample is relatively small (n = 245), leading to omitted variable bias in the regression. The “working-from-home” variable is potentially endogenous. The small sample size does not allow the authors to use detailed information on the self-employment industry. Future research should focus on finding larger samples and a way to instrument for working from home. Social implications – Work/life trends and communications technology have made working from home more prevalent (Mateyka et al., 2012). It is important for researchers and policymakers to understand the gendered implications of basing a business at home. Originality/value – The study is the first to use population-based data to focus specifically on gender gaps in earnings of self-employed Millennials in relation to working from home.

Gender and ethnic earnings gaps in seven West African cities

Women continue to earn less than their male counterparts globally. Scholars and feminist activists have suggested a partial explanation for this gender gap in earnings could be women's limited access to power structures at the workplace. Using the linked employer–employee data of the Workplace Employment Relations Study 2004–2011, this article asks what happens to the gender gap in earnings among non‐managerial employees when the share of women in management at the workplace increases. The findings, based on workplace‐fixed time‐fixed effects regression models, suggest that workplace‐level increases in the share of women in management are associated with decreases of the non‐managerial gender gap in earnings. This effect appears to be largely unrelated to changes in equality and diversity policies, family‐friendly arrangements and support for carers at the workplace.

A quantitative theory of the gender gap in wages

This paper assesses the relative importance of various explanations for the gender gap in career outcomes for highly-educated workers in the U.S. corporate and financial sectors. The careers of MBAs, who graduated between 1990 and 2006 from a top U.S. business school, are studied to understand how career dynamics differ by gender. Although male and female MBAs have nearly identical (labor) incomes at the outset of their careers, their earnings soon diverge, with the male annual earnings advantage reaching almost 60 log points at ten to 16 years after MBA completion. We identify three proximate reasons for the large and rising gender gap in earnings: differences in training prior to MBA graduation; differences in career interruptions; and differences in weekly hours. These three determinants can explain the bulk of gender differences in earnings across the years following MBA completion. The presence of children is the main contributor to the lesser job experience, greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs. Some MBA mothers, especially those with well-off spouses, slow down in the labor market within a few years following their first birth. Disparities in the productive characteristics of male and female MBAs are small, but the pecuniary penalties from shorter hours and any job discontinuity are enormous for MBAs.

Gender gaps in earnings persist across all regions. For every dollar men make, women make 77 cents. Closing this gap can lead to sizeable gains for economies - an estimated 160 trillion dollars in global gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. A multitude of factors contributes to this gap and this note sheds light on some of the key drivers. Effective evidence-backed policy options to close the earnings gap include providing information on work opportunities and returns to employment, training in socio-emotional skills, imparting sector-specific technical skills to address occupational segregation and adopting pay-transparency laws. The World Bank Group actively supports countries to boost women's access to better, high-quality jobs through development policy lending, advisory and analytical work, and supporting reforms to address constraining contextual factors. This note examines an array of policy options that are effective or show promise in closing gender gaps in earnings and offers some key takeaways.

Suresh Narayanan Comment on Wage Differentials in Malaysia: Public Employment, Gender, and Ethnicity