Can fertility decline help explain gender pay convergence?

ABSTRACT: Prior scholarship demonstrates that motherhood wage penalties and fatherhood wage premiums contribute to the gender pay gap. These analyses typically take a cross-sectional perspective, asking to what extent gender inequalities in the association between parenthood and wages can explain gender pay inequality for a given cohort or at a given moment in time. By contrast, explorations of gender pay convergence over time have tended to start at the firm's door, testing the explanatory power of changes in men's and women's human capital and job characteristics and neglecting the contributions of fertility change. We bring these two strands of research together, asking to what extent declines 1980-2018 in US employees' number of children can explain gender pay convergence over the same period. U

SUBMITTER: Killewald A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11984295 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature