Gender Inequality: A Comparative View of the Challenges Ahead

The WAPPP Seminar this week was very special. Professor Mary C. Brinton, Department Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard and Professor Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics also at Harvard, introduced the new Weatherhead Initiative on Comparative Gender Inequality (WIGI) at the University to "study comparative gender inequality in OECD countries and outline some of the major scholarly and policy challenges relating to the structure of work and its articulation with the family". This is an exciting three-year interdisciplinary, cross-Harvard project, that will work closely with WAPPP at HKS, but whose creation is motivated by a set of very specific questions that are increasingly important for post-industrial economies:

• Why are some industrialized countries moving rapidly towards gender equality while others are not?
• Why are changes in gender roles producing more household disruption in some rich societies than in others?
• How will US households share care duties for seniors?
• How do changes in the welfare state differently affect the wellbeing of men and women?
• How can public policy facilitate the dual earner/dual caregiver model?
• How can employers level playing field for all genders?
• What are the economic and productivity implications of not fully integrating high human capital women into the workforce?  

  Professor Claudia Goldin presents the Weatherhead Initiative on Gender Inequality

To answer these difficult questions, WIGI's first task is to build a community of students and scholars that are committed to studying these topics. There will be a strong focus on bringing in undergraduates, in fact, two of the first three events in Spring of 2016 will involve undergraduate seniors and juniors who will present their senior thesis research or will begin working on one. Graduate students are also welcome and expected to play a significant role.

WIGI will work on the intersections of different thematic areas each year. In the first year, the focus will be the intersection of labor markets and household decisions related to gender. The second year will address issues at the intersection of household decisions and public policy, and the third will feature activities involving labor markets and public policy.

 

  Professor Mary C. Brinton

 

Professor Brinton went further into detail about the topic of discussion for WIGI's first year. She started by showing the situation of workers in a place with which everybody in the audience was very familiar: Harvard University. Using the 2013 Faculty Climate Survey, she showed the number of hours per day that faculty allotted to work and to domestic and care duties, and found that although male and female faculty work the same amount of hours, the women at all levels of seniority engage in significantly more hours of housework than their male counterparts. This difference is much larger for Junior Faculty. On average, female tenured faculty members put in ten more hours of work in the home than male tenured faculty. Untenured female professors put in twenty more hours than male untenured professors. "This is very, very local," the Professor warned, "this is us".

Female faculty at Harvard spend 10-20 more hrs. 

on domestic work than male faculty

She also spoke about higher relative stress levels for female faculty, with some of the most common cited reasons being childcare and children's education. She explained that on the one hand, women have become increasingly educated, and their college graduation levels now surpass the men's in developed economies, but that on the other hand, not much has changed in the domestic arena, where women are expected to work more. This tension, she believes, is a driving force behind lower fertility rates and the aging populations in rich countries: "It's really, really hard to work full time and be mothers".

She then discussed the case of Japan, where she conducts a good amount of her research, and where this phenomenon is producing difficult consequences. Fertility rates in Japan have been under population replacement level, that is, under 2 children per woman, for over thirty years. The country is running out of a labor force, but the model has not yet become friendly to a dual earner-dual caregiver family model. Instead, many highly skilled women are pushed out of the labor force when they become mothers by a context that requires long working hours of both genders and does not provide incentives for males to take part in caregiving duties.

Professor Goldin continued this discussion by touching the topic of occupations, to see what makes some more friendly for the dual family model than others. She mentioned how sometimes the gender wage gap is explained by stating the fact that women tend to go into lower-paying, care-related occupations, and used data evidencing within-occupation pay gaps to show how that explanation is incomplete. For example, women in finance can earn up to 35% less than men in finance, while women in tech are earning 10% less than males in that sector.

But why is there a gap between occupations? She explained this by pointing out an important difference in the wage structures of each field. Using O*NET data from the Department of Labor, she showed that the gender gap is larger in occupations like finance, where there is a linear relationship between earnings and hours worked, than in tech, where people are remunerated more based on output. The latter structure favors women because, as was mentioned, they face higher demand for their time outside the workplace. In industries where there is temporal flexibility, women thrive (although it remains noteworthy that even in these fields there is still a gap, albeit smaller).

She suggested that a possible way to make any workplace more time-flexible would be to make employees more interchangeable. If in each workplace there are two workers who can easily substitute for each other at any point, they will have much more freedom to step in and out at times that work for them. This model can free men and women to take on more roles in the home. You can "fix the men", you can "fix the women", but until you actually "fix the firms and the occupations", modify the whole model, inequality will persist, she argued. 

Want to stay updated about activities related to this promising new initiative? Email jbarnard@wcfia.harvard.edu to subscribe to the mailing list!

Reserving Time for Daddy: The Long and Short-Term Consequences of Fathers' Quotas

People often think economists only worry about inflation, interest rates, or fiscal policy, but did you ever think that economics researchers would be working on figuring out ways for couples to share child care and housework more equitably? Well, they do! In the latest edition of the HKS WAPPP Seminar, economist Ankita Patnaik, from Mathematica Policy Research, presented her work on the long term and short term effects of paternity leave on families. She is part of a group of up and coming scholars that, according to Professor Hannah Riley-Bowles, are producing research that reminds us that the topic of gender encompasses more than women; equality concerns everyone.

Patnaik began by providing an overview of encouraging trends that have emerged in recent decades. In some contexts, women have been catching up to men in the formal labor market, though pay gaps remain, and have closed gaps in realms like education. In contrast, 'care work', which includes unpaid tasks such as housework or child care in the home, is strongly characterized by sex-specialization and takes up more of women's time. In the typical household according to studies, women are assigned inflexible tasks that need to be performed regularly and at fixed times, like cooking dinner, for example. In contrast, men usually take on tasks that can be performed at any time and are not routine, like fixing various items or mowing the lawn.

These differences can hurt women at work and reduce their bargaining power within the household. They can result in lower priority assigned to women's activities outside the home. For example, researchers observe that women are more likely to quit their job in response to husband's long work hours and more likely to relocate to accommodate a partner's professional path.

Before Patnaik's research, studies had found a relationship between parental leave schemes that included a paternity leave provision and the number of men taking leave to perform childcare duties. They could not pinpoint a causal relationship though and the effect of fathers' leave on housework sharing was not clear. Her contribution provides answers to these questions by looking at a very special policy episode that happened in Canada in 2006.

Dr. Ankita Patnaik, Mathematica Policy Research

The province of Quebec put into place a parental leave scheme called QPIP Reform, which made it easier to qualify, provided more compensation, and included a five-week 'daddy-only' provision for leave in addition the mother's. Families with babies born beginning on January 1st would be eligible. This allowed Patnaik to compare eligible families with those that just missed the date and would be governed by the old scheme, which only provided with maternity and shared leave. The results are very impressive.

The likelihood that fathers would take paternity leave went up by 53 percentage points, and their leaves became three weeks longer. "Norms play a critical role", she explained. Because this policy is aimed specifically for fathers, social norms become more accepting of men leaving work to take care of a child than when the policy was shared leave. After the quota, "dads are more likely to take their leave if their brother or their boss took it", she remarked. She calls her findings "the flypaper effect", because the quotas stick to the dad's when they are directed specifically to them. Labels matter!

What is even more impressive is that she found that these five weeks of leave can have effects that are much more long lasting than could have been expected. After five years, moms in Quebec were spending an hour longer at work on average, making about $5,000 Canadian dollars more, and more likely to be working full-time. Dads were spending more time doing 'carework' and their work hours and earnings were unaffected.

Ankita Patnaik will continue to work on this issue, her findings are key to any policy maker working on closing gender gaps.

The Power of Working Moms

In the week’s WAPPP seminar “It Takes a Family and a Country,” Harvard Business School Professor Kathleen McGinn spoke on the importance of role models, both within the home and on the country level, and how they affect economic outcomes – and welfare outcomes more broadly – of both women and men.

McGinn started by asking a seemingly simple question: What drives outcomes between men and women? In developed countries, women on average are more educated than men, so a traditional understanding of learning or education doesn’t explain the advantage men hold over women in many areas. McGinn and her coauthors, Mayra Ruiz Castro also of HBS and Babson College, and Elizabeth Long Lingo of Mount Holyoke College, looked instead at learning in the home and from famous national figures, or what they refer to as the “role model effect.”

Their research question was “Are non-traditional gender role models in families and in societies related to national, organizational, and individual differences in (1) employment, (2) supervisory responsibility, (3) earnings, (4) allocation of household work and (5) caring for family members?

Studying this effect across 25 countries, McGinn et al used survey data from 2002 and 2012 to see changes in attitudes and outcomes over time. The data suggests that gender inequality has shrunk over the past decade, though unevenly. Women still do more work at home than men do across countries, though in more developed countries, there is less time in aggregate spent on household duties due to technological advances. Gender attitudes have also gotten more liberal over time, which counters recent research that suggests they're stagnating.

What happens when your role model at home is also a
country-level role model?

To measure the effects of gender inequality and its variations within country, McGinn et al defined role models on the micro and macro level. The study described role models at home as working mothers, defined as mothers who ever got paid for work outside the home before the respondent was 14 years old. To measure country-level role models, the study also looked at the average proportion of female parliamentarians in a respondent’s country before he or she turned 14. The focus on role models was critical because they shape what people see as appropriate behavior via exposure. Results indicated that this was especially true for role models within the family.

(1) Employment: The effect of being raised by a working mother is significant for women only. Likewise, the proportion of female parliamentarians during childhood increases women’s likelihood of employment but has no effect on men's employment.

(2) Supervisory roles: Women are generally less likely to hold supervisory positions across countries. There was no supervisory effect of having a working mother for men, but having a working mother had a significant and increasing effect for women. The effect of female parliamentarians is negative for women holding supervisory roles, though McGinn and her coauthors are still trying to understand why.

(3) Earnings: Being raised by a working mother had no effect on men’s relative incomes, while women’s incomes were higher for those raised by a working mother. This effect was mitigated by gender attitudes, however. Perhaps surprisingly, growing up during an era with a relatively large proportion of women in parliament dampens wages, and this effect is more pronounced for men.

(4) Allocation of household work: McGinn emphasized that gender inequality in the public sphere is affected by gender inequality at home, though the cycle flows both ways. Earlier research assumed that households acted as single units with shared preferences, but more recent research has acknowledged and accounted for individual preferences within households. Being raised by a working mother decreases women’s hours and increases men’s hours spent on household work, and growing up during an era with relatively large proportion of women in parliament had the same effects.

(5) Caring for family members: Being raised by a working mom increases both men and women’s role with children, and gender attitudes have no effect. A higher proportion of female parliamentarians increased just men's time spent caring for family members.

In short, having a mother who worked outside the home improved women’s outcomes in the workplace and increased men’s participation in household work. As McGinn put it, "There are few magic pills that have proven to reduce gender inequality in all of these public and private spheres, but being raised by a working mother comes close."