Prior scholarship demonstrates that motherhood wage penalties and fatherhood wage premiums contribute to the gender pay gap. These analyses typically take a cross-sectional perspective, asking to what extent gender inequalities in the association between parenthood and wages can explain gender pay inequality for a given cohort or at a given moment in time. By contrast, explorations of gender pay convergence over time have tended to start at the firm’s door, testing the explanatory power of changes in men’s and women’s human capital and job characteristics and neglecting the contributions of fertility change. We bring these two strands of research together, asking to what extent declines 1980–2018 in US employees’ number of children can explain gender pay convergence over the same period. Using a descriptive decomposition and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that, in gross terms, fertility decline can explain almost one-quarter of gender pay convergence from 1980 to 2018. Even net of a host of controls for human capital and job characteristics, fertility decline explains 8 percent of the attenuation of the US gender pay gap 1980–2018—about half as much as changes in education and about a quarter as much as changes in full-time work experience and job tenure combined. Finally, we show that employees’ fertility decline was fastest in the 1980s and subsequently slowed; this, in conjunction with persistent gender differences in parenthood–wage associations, helps explain stalled progress toward gender pay parity.

中文翻译：

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生育率下降可以帮助解释性别薪酬趋同吗？


先前的学术研究表明，母亲工资罚款和父亲工资溢价导致了性别工资差距。这些分析通常采用横断面视角，询问育儿和工资之间关联的性别不平等在多大程度上可以解释特定群体或特定时刻的性别薪酬不平等。相比之下，对性别薪酬随时间趋同的探索往往从公司门口开始，测试男性和女性人力资本和工作特征变化的解释力，而忽视了生育率变化的贡献。我们将这两方面的研究放在一起，询问 1980 年至 2018 年美国员工子女人数的下降在多大程度上可以解释同期性别薪酬趋同。使用来自收入动态面板研究的描述性分解和数据，我们表明，从总体上看，生育率下降可以解释 1980 年至 2018 年近四分之一的性别薪酬趋同。即使不考虑人力资本和工作特征的一系列控制措施，生育率下降也解释了 1980 年至 2018 年美国性别工资差距缩小的 8%——大约是教育变化的一半，大约是全职工作经验和工作任期变化总和的四分之一。最后，我们表明员工的生育率下降在 1980 年代最快，随后放缓;这与父母-工资协会中持续存在的性别差异相结合，有助于解释在实现性别薪酬平等方面进展停滞不前的原因。