Why Family Leave Policies are Important in Closing the Gender Pay Gap
By: Joann Cai
Tags: Gender Roles, Equality, Gender Equality, Equal Pay, Gender Pay Gap

The gender pay gap is a large and complex issue. It has over a century’s worth of history rooted in gender inequality and societal gender roles that is difficult to disentangle from the problem. Although we have come a long way from the days when women were not allowed to hold a job or have an education, the 2019 Gender Pay Gap Report shows that women still only earn 79 cents for every $1 earned by men in the United States.

With the education gap closing in the United States, and the emergence of diversity & inclusion departments in many top companies across the country, it’s easy to wonder why this is still the case.

Unfortunately, unconscious gender biases and gender discrimination still exist in the work place. There was a Yale study that demonstrated just how prevalent unconscious biases are in the hiring process. In the study, researchers sent out dozens of student applications to top science professors. The resumes were identical, except that half the resumes were for a male student, John, and the other half were for a female student, Jennifer. The results showed an overwhelming bias towards the male applicant over the female applicant in terms of competency and likelihood of being hired, even though the qualifications and content of the resume were the same.

While unconscious bias plays a huge role in this problem, it only explains a tiny portion of the gender wage gap. The 2019 Gender Pay Gap Report showed that the gender wage gap in the US for 18–24 year olds was 1.4%, but this percentage greatly increased to 12.4% for 55–64 year olds.

The reason behind this can be explained by what many call the “motherhood penalty”.

In recent years, women and men can enter the workforce on a relatively even playing field, but as people start to enter the life stage of starting a family, there comes the question of –who can or should take family leave and for how long?

Currently, the United States federal policy offers up to 12 weeks of unpaid family leave that can be taken within one year of the birth or adoption of a child. This is by far one of the worst ranking family leave policies in the world considering the country’s strong economic status.

Fortunately, most companies have their own family policies in place and many of them are quite generous. Companies like Facebook, Square, and Zendesk offer up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, while Twitter offers up to 20 weeks of paid leave.

However, not everyone is fortunate enough to work at these top tech companies and have these generous leave options. The reality is that most people in the country still work in jobs where it isn’t as easy to make these decisions. Often, parents must choose who amongst themselves will have to take more parental leave. In many cases, it is the mother who ends up taking more time off or working part time to care for the child because it makes the most financial sense for the family. The existence of the gender wage gap means that men still tend to be the breadwinners and it is easier to justify having the lesser paying parent make the career sacrifice.

Furthermore, there is still this great expectation placed on women to be the primary child caretaker. Even if both parents could take minimal leave and stay on their career trajectory, mothers are expected to carry more of the childcare duties. In this case, not only does a mother work full time during the day, but she also tends to bear more of the childcare responsibilities after work. This also includes responsibilities such as staying at home with the child when they are sick, taking the child to soccer practice, and taking part in the PTA meetings. All these little decisions add up, and it ends up being much easier to promote a man who does not have to leave work early to pick up the kids or go to parent teacher conferences than a mother who is likely to take on those responsibilities.

This is not to say that this is the situation for every household, but in more cases than not, it tends to be the mother who makes more of the parental sacrifices.

Eventually, this is where the scale starts to tip in favor of men, and where it becomes harder to close that gender wage gap. What started out as a level playing field slowly starts to become uneven.

To bring the scale back to balance, there needs to be a change not only in our parental leave policies to encourage more fathers in taking leave, but also a shift in the attitude towards the gender roles in child care responsibilities. Better parental leave policies mean that parents will have more options when it comes to who can stay at home and who can continue to excel their careers. A change in gender discourse around childcare responsibilities will allow fathers to take away some of the burden and expectations placed around mothers to always be the one making the parental sacrifice.

Although these are not the only two ideologies that need to be fulfilled when it comes to closing the gender wage gap –we still need to overcome the obstacle of unconscious bias & discrimination in the workplace –they do bring us one step closer.