The Family Gap in Pay: New Evidence for 1967 to 2013
This paper provides new evidence on the family gap in pay—the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children—between 1967 and 2013, five decades that include important changes in women's employment, especially mothers’ employment, policy reforms as well as c...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Russell Sage Foundation
2016-08-01
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| Series: | RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2016.2.4.04 |
| Summary: | This paper provides new evidence on the family gap in pay—the differential in hourly wages between women with children and women without children—between 1967 and 2013, five decades that include important changes in women's employment, especially mothers’ employment, policy reforms as well as contrasting economic cycles. We use data from the Current Population Survey and adjust for selection into motherhood, by estimating ordinary least square models and (as a robustness check) applying augmented inverse probability of treatment weighting, using the standard doubly robust estimator. For women overall, we find a decline in the family gap over this period from 6 percent in 1967 and 1968 to about 1 percent in 2011 through 2013. However, results vary by marital status, education, race-ethnicity, immigration status, temporal flexibility, and occupation. The most striking difference we find is between mothers who are married and those who are not. The family gap declined for married mothers and was replaced by a positive wage differential in the most recent period, whereas for unmarried mothers, a wage gap persisted throughout the two decades, rising to a notable high of 10 percent in 1996 through 1998. |
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| ISSN: | 2377-8253 2377-8261 |