The Size And Legitimacy Of Gender And Motherhood Pay Gaps In Cross-National Perspective

Gender pay gaps receive due attention in high quality academic (e.g., England 2005) and non-academic research worldwide (e.g., IWPROECD), as well as in the media. It is often overlooked, however, that the size of the gap (and the gender difference in other labor market outcomes, such as career interruptions and their length) varies by job characteristics, such as occupational status, as well as by individual characteristics, such as age and, as discussed below, parenthood status. 

The existence of wage cuts incurred by working mothers across countries and welfare regimes (henceforth “motherhood penalties”) is a well established, albeit not always well understood, phenomenon (e.g., Budig et al. 2016Abendroth et al. 2014). In Poland, for example, there is a common misconception that mothers do not incur such penalties. One major reason for this is that OECD reports systematically show that Poland has one of the smallest gender pay gaps (GPGs) among all OECD nations. This leads many to infer that, since the gaps are small, there must not be motherhood penalties. 

The problem is that these data do not control for important productivity characteristics, such as education, working hours, and experience. For example, in Poland (and elsewhere), women are better educated than men, which means that simple unadjusted estimates would understate gender pay gaps. The simple approaches are also misleading insofar as they do not control for occupational prestige, job complexity, and income. Studies conducted in the U.S., for example, show that the size of the gender pay gap is correlated with these variables (England et al. 2016). That is, women in high prestige, more demanding, and better-paying jobs experience higher penalties, especially when they become mothers, than women in low and medium level occupations. 

So, is the situation in Poland as rosy as the OECD estimates make it out to be?

Is The Motherhood Penalty Real? The Evidence From Poland

It has long been assumed that the residual gap in earnings between men and women (after controlling for productivity characteristics, occupation and industry segregation, and union membership status) is due to gender discrimination. A growing body of evidence, however, suggests that it may also reflect the effect of having children.

According to this research, employed mothers now account for most of the gender gap in wages (Glass 2004). In the U.S., controlling for work experience, hourly wages of mothers are approximately four percent lower for each child they have, compared to the wages of non-mothers (Budig and England, 2001). The magnitude of these family effects differs across countries, but, in general, men accrue modest earnings premiums for fatherhood, whereas women incur significant earnings penalties for motherhood (Waldfogel, 1998; Harkness and Waldfogel, 2003; Sigle-Rushton and Waldfogel, 2007; Budig and Hodges, 2010; Hodges and Budig, 2010; Smith Koslowski, 2011).

The size of the penalty seems also to vary by whether women and men are toward the top or bottom of the employment hierarchies of skills and wages, and it also varies across countries (England et al. 2014; Cooke 2014). The findings in this area are sometimes inconsistent, however, and suggest that there is a need to include a combination of skills and wages (England et al. 2014) and to choose carefully measures of job interruptions (Staff and Mortimer, 2012).

Measuring The Success Of Informal STEM Programs For Girls

Despite substantial improvement over the past half decade, the gender pay gap still persists in the U.S. When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, women made 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. Fifty years later, in 2014, women earned 81 cents on the male dollar. One area on which educators and policymakers have focused to rectify the gender pay differential is encouraging young girls to go into the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, women account for half of the workforce in the U.S., but they are employed in less than 25 percent of STEM positions. Women in STEM fields earn 33 percent more than comparable women in non-STEM occupations, but women hold far fewer STEM undergraduate degrees than men, especially in engineering. And, perplexingly, even women with a STEM degree seem less inclined to work in STEM jobs; they are more likely than STEM-educated men to choose education or healthcare. The main explanations for these discrepancies include lack of female role models, discrimination against females at school and in the work place, and gender stereotypes (Hill et al. 2010).

Informal STEM programs offer one potential means of improving female participation in these fields, with the “informal” meaning that the learning occurs in an out-of-school environment (Krishnamurthi and Rennie 2013). A program called Girls Inc. Operation SMART, for example, runs an initiative called Eureka!, which seeks to provide eighth grade girls with internship opportunities in math, science, and technology. The organization Techbridge offers Girls Go Techbridge, which holds learning activities, and a role model training program, which connects girls with volunteers who are passionate about motivating them to get involved in science, technology and engineering. Other initiatives include the National Science Partnership for Girl Scouts and Science Museums (NSP), Women in Natural Sciences (WINS), and Rural Girls in Science.

The Big Story About Gender Gaps In Test Scores

The OECD recently published a report about differences in test scores between boys and girls on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is a test of 15 year olds conducted every three years in multiple subjects. The main summary finding is that, in most nations, girls are significantly less likely than boys to score below the “proficient” threshold in all three subjects (math, reading and science). The report also includes survey items and other outcomes.

First, it is interesting to me how discussions of these gender gaps differ from those about gaps between income or ethnicity groups. Specifically, when we talk about gender gaps, we interpret them properly – as gaps in measured performance between groups of students. Any discussion of gaps between groups defined in terms of income or ethnicity, on the other hand, are almost always framed in terms of school performance.

This is partially because schools in the U.S. are segregated by income and ethnicity, but not really by gender, and also because some folks have a tendency to overestimate the degree to which income- and ethnicity-based achievement gaps stem from systematic variation in schooling inputs, whereas in reality they are more a function of non-school factors (though, of course, schools matter, and differences in school quality reinforce the non-school-based impact). That said, returning to the findings of this report, I was slightly concerned with how, in some cases, they were reported in the media.

I Am Malala: A Book Review

In October, 2012, the Pakistani Taliban attempted to assassinate Malala Yousafzai, a teenager known throughout Pakistan for her outspoken advocacy of woman’s rights, especially a woman’s right to education. Standing up for women’s rights can be a risky business in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, where violent Islamist extremists have a strong foothold. But these religious disputes were thought to be mainly an adult affair. Innocents suffered, to be sure, but only as a regrettable consequence of grownups’ attacks on each other. Few expected that even the Taliban would target a precocious schoolgirl – until Malala.

The attack triggered an international uproar. Malala was shot in the head while sitting in a school bus (two of her friends also were hit in the spray of gunfire). It was a survivable injury, but the critical care facilities she needed do not exist in Pakistan. After initial fumbles, Pakistani government officials scrambled to respond. Malala was whisked away to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England. She recovered and, with her family, began a new life in exile, still under Taliban death threat. The teenager from Pakistan’s remote Swat Valley of is an international celebrity. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and received the 2013 Andrei Sakharov Award. She has been made an honorary citizen of Canada. She has spoken at the United Nations and, recently, she met Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.

And now, with the help of a skilled ghostwriter, Ms. Yousafzai has written a book: I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.

The Educational Attainment Of Girls And Boys: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Last month, Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl, was shot in the head, in an attempted assassination by Taliban militants. Her “crime” was daring to advocate for girls’ education. In a New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof observes that we in the West find it “easy to dismiss such incidents as distant barbarities," and uses the example of sex trafficking to illustrate that we “have a blind spot for our own injustices." I agree. However, I am not sure we need to go so far to find domestic injustices.

How about a close look within this very area: The education of girls (and boys) in the U.S.? Stories about how girls have surpassed boys in educational attainment have become common, and are often linked to statements about how boys are forgotten and/or lost. This rhetoric is troubling for several reasons. First, it can be read to imply a zero-sum equation; that is, that the educational advancement of girls is the cause of boys’ educational neglect. Second, stories about girls’ “successes” and boys’ “failures” may obscure more than they reveal.

There are the "lost boys" of higher education and the "missing girls" of STEM. We worry about boys and reading and girls and math. Recurring questions include where are the women in technology? Or, are there enough novels that cater to boys? Women have sailed past men in obtaining college degrees but, importantly, continue to concentrate in different fields and need Ph.D.s to match men with bachelor’s in the workplace.

When issues are addressed in this fragmented manner, it’s hard to tell if it’s girls or boys that we should be worrying about. Well, both and neither. What all these pieces of the puzzle really say is that – at least in this day, age, and nation – gender still matters.

Attempted Assassination In Pakistan

What would drive armed gunmen to open fire on a bus full of schoolgirls, with the express aim of assassinating one talented young teenager? That’s the question on the minds of many people this week, following Tuesday’s attempted assassination of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai in northwestern Pakistan. A refugee fleeing Taliban violence and oppression in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Malala had already won a following for her precocious and courageous blog posts, written when she was really just a child, arguing that young women have a right to an education, and indeed, to a life free from discrimination and fear.

She is also a hero to many Pakistanis. In 2011, the Pakistani government awarded her a national peace prize and 1 million rupees (US$10,500). In 2012, she was a finalist for the International Children’s Peace Prize, awarded by a Dutch organization, in recognition of her courage in defying the Taliban by advocating for girls’ education.  

That's Not Teacher-Like

I’ve been reading Albert Shanker’s “The Power of Ideas: Al In His Own Words," the American Educator’s compendium of Al’s speeches and columns, published posthumously in 1997. What an enjoyable, witty and informative collection of essays.

Two columns especially caught my attention: “That’s Very Unprofessional Mr. Shanker!" and “Does Pavarotti Need to File an Aria Plan” – where Al discusses expectations for (and treatment of) teachers. They made me reflect, yet again, on whether perceptions of teacher professionalism might be gendered. In other words, when society thinks of the attributes of a professional teacher, might we unconsciously be thinking of women teachers? And, if so, why might this be important?

In “That’s Very Unprofessional, Mr. Shanker!" Al writes:

Mind The Gap

We have been engaged in decades-long public policy debates on gaps and how best to close them: the income gap, the student achievement gap, gender-linked gaps in employment opportunities. But why do we care so much about gaps? In a land of diversity, why are subgroup differences such a concern?

At a basic level, we care about gaps because (or when) our fundamental assumption is that, on a “level playing field," there should be no systematic differences among people based on ascribed traits, such as race and gender, that are unrelated to the “game." It is “ok” if a specific Hispanic kid performs at a lower level than his/her white counterpart or vice-versa. But it’s not ok if, on average, Hispanic students’ test scores systematically lag behind that of similar white children. Why? Because we know intelligence and ability are normally distributed across racial/ethnic groups. So, when groups differ in important outcomes, we know that this "distance” is indicative of other problems.

What problems exactly? That is a more complex question.

Gender Pay Gaps And Educational Achievement Gaps

There is currently an ongoing rhetorical war of sorts over the gender wage gap. One “side” makes the common argument that women earn around 75 cents on the male dollar (see here, for example).

Others assert that the gender gap is a myth, or that it is so small as to be unimportant.

Often, these types of exchanges are enough to exasperate the casual observer, and inspire claims such as “statistics can be made to say anything." In truth, however, the controversy over the gender gap is a good example of how descriptive statistics, by themselves, say nothing. What matters is how they’re interpreted.

Moreover, the manner in which one must interpret various statistics on the gender gap applies almost perfectly to the achievement gaps that are so often mentioned in education debates.