The Family Gap: Do Mothers Earn Less

Women must work fifteen months and eight days to earn what men earn in a year" (Lesley, 1999). In a society where women are often single mothers who must support both themselves and children, why would they get paid less than men for doing the same job? When John F. Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which promised women "equal pay for equal work," women earned only 58 cents for every dollar men earned. This pay gap is disappearing at a rate of about ten cents every twenty to thirty years (Leinwand, 1999). And more recently, President Clinton announced last year that the government would enforce equal-pay laws more diligently in 1999 and in the future. Employers were told to look more closely at their compensation policies and other possible sources of (unintentional) gender bias (Fitzer, 1999). Michael Bartlett, U.S. Chamber of Commerce manager of labor law policy, states that, "any pay inequity is the result of muddled arithmetic, faulty logic and failing to control for variables such as experience, education and choice of occupation. Women being absent from the work force for some period of time I think does adversely impact on their wages, as it should, because they don't have as much experience." When these variables are considered, the Independent Women's Forum found the pay gap is almost non-existent for childless women between ages of 27 and 33. However, in 1999, women supposedly still earned only 76 cents for every dollar earned by a man (Leinwald, 1999). The gender pay gap, no matter what the statistical discrepancy, is narrowing. But while the gender pay gap's 'glass ceiling' has received so much attention, another pay gap has been increasing and has received very little attention. This pay gap is the 'family gap’; the pay penalty that women with children get in relation to women without children. And it is this obscure pay gap, dealing with the division of domestic labor, that is suspected to contribute to the gender pay gap (Joshi, Paci, & Waldfogel, 1999). Jane Waldfogel found that between 1980 and 1991, the pay ratio between mothers and non-mothers has increased by 7.5%. She states that "in 1980, young mothers earned 56% of the average male salary, while non-mothers earned 66%, so the gap between mothers and non-mothers relative to men's pay was 10%. By 1991, young mothers had improved their hourly earnings to 72.6% of the average male level, but the ratio for non-mothers had risen all the way to 90.1% of average male earnings" (Waldfogel, 1998). This paper will focus on this family pay gap because it is not as well publicized to the average female worker, although it affects millions of women everyday. There is abundant research available with theories on why this pay gap may or may not exist; although plentiful, the research is often contradictory. Section II will present the differing views on the family pay gap as presented in previous research. A statistical analysis using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) database will also be presented with variables extracted from those theories. Policy implications will then be made based on the results of the regressions. And, especially if you are a woman planning on having children someday while working at a successful career, read on. The following pages will be of great interest.