What explains the gender wage gap – Nearly 60 percent is influenced by all the structural and social factors

Occupational differences

One of the largest driving factors of the gender wage gap is the fact that men and women, on average, work in different industries and occupations; this accounts for up to 49.3 percent of the wage gap, according to some estimates. Women are much more likely than men to be clustered in just a few occupations, with nearly half of all working women—44.4 percent—employed in just 20 occupations, including secretaries and administrative assistants, registered nurses, and school teachers. Meanwhile, only about one-third—34.8 percent—of men are employed in the top 20 occupations for male workers, including truck drivers, managers, and supervisors.

Interestingly, only four occupations—retail salespersons, first-line supervisors and managers of retail stores, cooks, and all other managers—appear in both genders’ top 20 most common occupations. Not only are women more likely to be concentrated in fewer types of jobs, those jobs are more likely to be female dominated—a fact that often leads to lower wages. Female-dominated industries pay lower wages than male-dominated industries requiring similar skill levels, and the effect is stronger in jobs that require higher levels of education.Women are more likely to be concentrated in low-wage work,and they make up the majority of minimum-wage workers in the United States. The top 10 occupations for women all pay men more on average, including secretaries and administrative assistants, registered nurses, teachers, and cashiers. In fact, out of the 534 occupations tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only seven pay women more than men on average, such as respiratory therapists and stock clerks. The jobs that pay women more on average employ about 1.5 million women, or approximately 3 percent of the full-time female labor force…

So while the 77-cent figure compares working women and men in different jobs, it is influenced by occupational segregation and the different wages men and women earn even within the same types of jobs.

All this could be used to argue that the wages for men and women would be the same if only women were not choosing traditionally female-dominated industries. But in reality, there are several factors that lead women to traditionally female-dominated roles, including the gendered socialization that trains girls from childhood to embody the sorts of traits that translate well into traditionally feminine jobs centered on nurturing, service, and supporting other people in their jobs. As the following sections illustrate, there are structural factors that influence the different career paths of men and women—factors that should be addressed to ensure that all workers are able to work and contribute to the economy in ways that make the most of their abilities and strengths.

Differences in hours

Women not only work in different occupations, but they also work fewer hours in the workplace: 35 minutes less per day than men, among full-time working men and women. What accounts for that difference in time? Interestingly, when home and child care work is taken into account, the time gap looks very different. Employed mothers with a child under age 6 spend about 47 more minutes per day caring for and helping household members, compared to employed fathers. Parents of older children also have a caring time gap, though it is smaller—about 22 minutes per day. The data suggest that women’s reduction in work hours can be accounted for when taking into consideration the fact that women provide more unpaid care in the home, at least in homes with children.

While the fact that full-time working women put in fewer hours on average certainly affects the wage gap, the penalty women pay for working less is not as straightforward as a simple subtraction in hourly wages. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin has found that in some well-paid occupations, such as business and law, people who work very long hours receive a disproportionate increase in their wages—which means that those who work fewer hours receive disproportionately lower pay. In these types of jobs, for example, working 20 percent fewer hours results in a reduction in compensation of more than 20 percent. Some research shows that the career costs of childbearing are particularly high for highly skilled women in professional occupations, likely in part because there is not a direct relationship between hours and wages for women who find themselves on the “mommy track.”

Some critics use this as fuel for their argument that the wage gap only exists because women scale back their work hours to care for their families. But that belief rests upon a very abstract take on reality. The fact is, in real life, women work the way they do for reasons that, for all but the most privileged, have very little to do with choosing purely between work and family life. In fact, there is a cyclical relationship between women’s wages and unpaid care work within the home.

Family caregiving

When women earn less to begin with, often due to occupational segregation, it may make economic sense for them to be the ones to scale back to provide family care for children or aging relatives. In turn, that reduction in job hours and job tenure both lowers women’s wages overall and contributes to the cultural notion that women are not as devoted to employment once they have children. Mothers, on average, have lower earnings than women without children, and while some of this gap may be due to working fewer hours, at least some of it persists even when productivity is taken into account. The unfortunate truth is that mothers are perceived as less dedicated employees after having children because many employers think mothers will be distracted by their home lives. At the same time, men tend to receive pay increases after becoming fathers, in part because fathers are assumed to be the breadwinners for their families even though most married men have working partners.

There’s also the fact that women are now more likely than ever before to be raising children without a partner—carrying all the weight of breadwinning and homemaking on their own shoulders. Nearly two-thirds of mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners for their families.And this does not even begin to take into account the lack of federal laws in this country that could help manage conflicts between caring for a family while still bringing in income…

‘Unexplained’ drivers of the wage gap

Cornell economists Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn have managed to quantify what percentage of the pay gap between men and women is due to aspects we cannot easily measure—aspects that go beyond things such as occupation, educational attainment, and years of experience. According to Blau and Kahn, this percentage is 41.1 percent. At least some of this is due to discrimination, even if it is subtle and subconscious. Combating gender and caregiver pay discrimination is a real and important challenge facing our country, which is why laws such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 are so important.

But the rest of the wage gap—nearly 60 percent—is influenced by all the structural and social factors that drive the decisions women make about where and how long they work. These factors constrain the choices that lead them to work and earn less. Altogether, they are why the 77-cent figure is meaningful: Comparing a woman and a man in the same occupation and with the same background in a very narrow way only tells you one part of the story—even though a gender wage gap still persists within these types of comparisons.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Explaining the Gender Wage Gap | Center for American Progress.