1 / 25

Background – The Gender Wage Gap

Division of Domestic Labour and Women ’ s Human Capital ESRC Gender Equality Network Project 4: Gender, Time Allocation and the “Wage Gap” Jonathan Gershuny & Man Yee Kan Centre for Time Use Research Department of Sociology University of Oxford. Background – The Gender Wage Gap.

lynton
Download Presentation

Background – The Gender Wage Gap

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Division of Domestic Labour and Women’s Human CapitalESRC Gender Equality Network Project 4: Gender, Time Allocation and the “Wage Gap”Jonathan Gershuny & Man Yee KanCentre for Time Use ResearchDepartment of SociologyUniversity of Oxford

  2. Background – The Gender Wage Gap • Introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970 • Gender wage gap has fallen but remained wide (EOC, 2001) • In 1999, 18% pay gap in the UK between men and women working FT (c.f. 36% in 1973) • 40% gap between female part-timers and male full-timers

  3. Background – The Gender Wage Gap Why gender pay gap? • Structure of labour market - e.g. occupational segregation & part-time jobs • 62% of women working full-time and 90% of women working part-time are employed in jobs mainly done by women(e.g. Paci et al. 1995). • “Human capital” explanation – gender difference in educational qualifications, work skills and training (e.g. Mincer & Polachek, 1974)  Our project investigates the relationship between the division of domestic labour and human capital accumulation

  4. Key hypothesis of the project • A gendered division of domestic labour leads to a gender gap in wages • Initial difference in human capital between partners  gendered division of labour  differentials in subsequent human capital formation

  5. Project aims and focus of this presentation For testing the main hypothesis of the project: • Creating a measure of human capital • Calibrating time use estimates for BHPS Aims of this paper: • Changes in women’s and men’s time use practices over the life course, and esp. since birth of first child • Investigating the impacts of domestic div. of labour and on human capital accumulation

  6. Defining human capital • “Human capital” refers to economically salient embodied resources e.g. skills, educational attainment, and specific knowledge of the sort that might be considered by prospective employers as justifying offers of employment (Becker, 1993; Coleman, 1988) • Sociological usage: “estimated value of economically salient work skills” – a key element of Weberian notion of “class situations” • We use a Heckman regression model to estimate “shadow wage” for BHPS

  7. Measuring human capital – Essex Score Kan & Gershuny, ISER WP 2006 - 03 Data from British Household Panel Survey • 5,500 households, 10,300 individuals, in wave one • 1991 - present Variables in the model: • Age, age squared • Dummies for education attainment • MOW scores (mean occupational wage, 2 digit categories, standardised to 0-100) • Work, unemployment, family care status over past 48 months • Dummies for top MOW decile and deciles 7 to 9 • Product of MOW dummies and age, age squared • Sex in selection equation

  8. Calibrating time use estimates I • Kan & Gershuny,ISER WP 2006-19 • British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) (1991 – 2005), containing a rich set of demographic information, employment characteristics and history and so on. • “Stylised questions” about normal weekly hours of paid and domestic work, frequency at various leisure activities collected since the 1994 wave. • Home On-line Study (HoL) (1999 – 2001) - a smaller scale study, but contains both diary-based and questionnaire-based (stylised) time use data. The survey part asked the same/similar set of stylised questions about time use as the BHPS.

  9. Calibrating time use estimates II • Pooled sample of diary and survey data from the HoL adult respondents (N = 2,265) • Regress diary-based time use estimates on stylised time use estimates • Identify same stylised variables in BHPS • Parameter estimates from HoL used to calibrate time use estimates for BHPS data

  10. Calibrating time use estimates III

  11. Aims of this paper • Examine changes in time use practices of married men and women over the life course, and their implications for the gender wage gap H1: Specialization in the domestic division of labour by gender increases over the lifecourse H2: The gender specialization in the dom. div of labour has negative impacts on women’s human capital accumulation

  12. Recap: Hypotheses H1: Specialization in the domestic division of labour by gender increases over the lifecourse H2: The gender specialization in the dom. div of labour has negative impacts on women’s human capital accumulation

  13. Conclusion • Women’s time use practices change to a greater extent than men’s after lifecycle events • Women become more specialized in domestic work, and men’s in paid work over time • Men and women have more or less the same total work (paid+unpaid domestic) But- Women’s potential wage suffers because: • Significant, negative relationship between proportion of domestic work on human capital

  14. Further work • Further analyses on the causal relationship between domestic division of labour and potential wage: • Instrumental variable approach • Models with lagged dependent variables • Graphical chain models

More Related