Specialization Then and Now: Marriage, Children, and the Gender Earnings Gap across Cohorts

摘要

Given women's gains in the labor market, Becker's (1981) seminal model predicts that patterns of specialization should become less gendered. It predicts that the gender earnings gap associated with marriage should fall, and it has. However, the gender earnings gap associated with children has been more persistent, and the proportion of the remaining gender earnings gap associated with children has risen. The persistent nature of the motherhood gap—particularly among professional women poised for high-paying careers, and among women who have access to generous leave benefits and childcare subsidies—brings home the point that women still devote much more time to child-rearing over the course of their careers than do men with similar human capital characteristics. One set of explanations put forward revolve around social norms that are slow to change and resist economic forces (Fortin 2005; Bertrand 2011; Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan 2015). Social norms can serve as both push or pull factors. On the pull side, women may still by-and-large identify themselves as the primary caretaker of children. On the push side, work places may still be governed by norms from an earlier era of male breadwinners with stay-at-home wives. According to this set of norms, an employee is a "good" employee only if he or she is married to the job and willing to work long hours. A number of papers have shown that the gender gap is particularly large in jobs that require long hours (Goldin 2014; Gicheva 2013; Cha and Wheeden 2014; Cortes and Pan 2016).