January 2013

IZA DP No. 7181: Is the Persistent Gender Gap in Income and Wages Due to Unequal Family Responsibilities?

Nikolay Angelov,Per Johansson,Erica Lindahl

forthcoming as 'Parenthood and the Gender Gap in Pay' in: Journal of Labor Economics, 2016, 34 (3)

We compare the income and wage trajectories of women in relation to their male partners before and after parenthood. Focusing on the within-couple gap allows us to control for both observed and unobserved attributes of the spouse and to estimate both short- and long-term effects of entering parenthood. Our main finding is that 15 years after the first child was born, the male-female gender gaps in income and wages have increased with 35 and 10 percentage points, respectively. In line with a collective labor supply model, the magnitude of these effects depends on relative incomes or wages within the family.