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Commentary By Kay S. Hymowitz

The Gender Wage Gap Shrinks, While the Parenthood Gap Grows

Culture Children & Family

Ever since women began pouring into the workforce in the 1960’s, the gender wage gap has served as shorthand for measuring progress towards women’s equality. The shorthand has its downsides. By collapsing all the ingredients that might influence earnings—education, hours worked, seniority, occupation, discrimination—into one aggregate number, the widely quoted figure has done some mischief in public debate, creating a convenient talking point for politicians and advocates, but one that hides many of the realities driving the gap. 

One of the most stubborn of those realities is the tension between work and motherhood. Researchers in even the most egalitarian countries have found that women take a hit to their earnings when they marry and have children; while men who become husbands and fathers earn more. Men get a welcome “fatherhood bonus,” as the conversation has it, while all women get is a rotten “motherhood penalty.”  

A new paper in Social Science Research, “The Declining Earnings Gap Between Young Women and Men in the United States 1979-2018” by John Iceland of Penn State and Ilana Redstone of the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, sets out to update our understanding of these work/family/income dynamics. Not only do they succeed in doing that, but the gender gap discussion may never be the same. 

Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies

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Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. She is the author of several books, most recently The New Brooklyn. This piece was adapted from City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here

This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies