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Title: Women Working for Less: Family Status and Women's Pay in the United States and United Kingdom
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Waldfogel, Jane |
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Women Working for Less: Family Status and Women's Pay in the United States and United Kingdom Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1994 Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Britain, British; Cross-national Analysis; Current Population Survey (CPS) / CPS-Fertility Supplement; Discrimination, Employer; Endogeneity; Family Studies; General Household Survey (GHS); Human Capital; Leave, Family or Maternity/Paternity; Modeling; NCDS - National Child Development Study (British); Variables, Instrumental; Wage Differentials; Wage Gap; Wages, Women; Work Experience This dissertation investigates the "family gap" (wage differentials among women related to family status) as well as the gender gap (wage inequality between men and women), using American and British data (the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and of Youth and the Current Population Survey from the US, and the National Child Development Study and the General Household Survey from the UK). In both the US and UK, there is a large family gap. Among young women, mothers' wages lag twenty percentage points behind non-mothers', relative to men's. There are three alternative, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses for this family gap. First, there might be no causal relationship between motherhood and lower wages and both might be due to unobserved heterogeneity. Second, the lower wages might be caused by the lower investment mothers make in human capital, such as education and experience. Third, some portion of the family gap might be due to the direct effects of family status. This dissertation investigates the effects of maternity leave, using an instrumental variables approach to control for the endogeneity of maternity leave usage, and finds a large positive effect of taking maternity leave and returning to the job. It also finds a large penalty to part-time work. Principal policy implications of this research are included. |
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Bibliography Citation
Waldfogel, Jane. Women Working for Less: Family Status and Women's Pay in the United States and United Kingdom. Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1994. |