Gender, Parenthood and Wage DifferencesThe Importance of Time-Consuming Job Characteristics

Charlotta Magnusson, Magnus Nermo•View original
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Having children raises men's wages. That is not a typo. Fathers in high-prestige jobs in Sweden earn roughly 20 percent more per hour than childless men in equivalent roles. The more prestigious the job, the bigger that bonus gets. Meanwhile, for women, parenthood runs in the opposite direction entirely. That is the central finding Magnusson and Nermo report using data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey, pooling the 2000 and 2010 waves into a sample of four thousand two hundred and seventy-four employed adults. Sweden makes for a pointed test case: female employment sits at around seventy-seven percent, parental leave is generous, and the dual-earner model is the cultural norm. Yet an unadjusted gender wage gap of roughly fifteen percent persists. The question is why, and more specifically, why the gap looks so different depending on where you sit in the occupational hierarchy and whether you have children. Two definitions do most of the analytical work here. Occupational prestige is measured using Treiman's Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale, or SIOPS, which is a continuous score running from thirteen to seventy-eight that ranks occupations by their social standing across countries. Time-consuming job characteristics are the second key concept. These include overnight business travel, working overtime frequently, unpaid overtime expectations, and the number of subordinates managed. The logic is that these demanding conditions are also wage-promoting ones; they tend to cluster in high-paying roles and may themselves drive pay differences between workers who hold them and those who do not. The empirical findings break down into three layers. First, marriage pays off for both sexes. Controlling for other factors, the wage premium for being married or cohabiting is positive for women and slightly larger for men. Second, parenthood diverges sharply by gender. The parenthood coefficient for women is negative — minus eight percent — while for men it is positive at around seven percent. Third, the male parenthood bonus is not spread evenly across the occupational ladder. It appears almost entirely at the top, in occupations scoring between sixty-six and seventy-eight on the SIOPS scale, where the fatherhood coefficient reaches zero point twenty-one and actually grows to zero point twenty-four after adding controls for time-consuming conditions. That last detail matters. Fathers do have greater access than childless men to time-consuming, wage-promoting jobs: more unpaid overtime and more subordinates. But adding those controls does not shrink the fatherhood premium. It expands it. So whatever is driving the bonus, it is not simply that fathers work longer or manage more people. For women, the story is different: accounting for time-consuming conditions does reduce the prestige-based gender gap, from about twenty-three percent to sixteen percent in high-prestige occupations. Magnusson and Nermo flag two candidate explanations: selection, meaning more career-oriented men may sort into fatherhood, and employer treatment, meaning firms may reward fathers as presumed breadwinners. Their data cannot separate these. However, in a country with some of the world's most egalitarian labor policies, the fact that parenthood still splits men's and women's wage trajectories so cleanly is the finding that sticks. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.

Having children raises men's wages. That is not a typo. Fathers in high-prestige jobs in Sweden earn roughly 20 percent more per hour than childless men in equivalent roles. The more prestigious the job, the bigger that bonus gets. Meanwhile, for women, parenthood runs in the opposite direction entirely. That is the central finding Magnusson and Nermo report using data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey, pooling the 2000 and 2010 waves into a sample of four thousand two hundred and seventy-four employed adults. Sweden makes for a pointed test case: female employment sits at around seventy-seven percent, parental leave is generous, and the dual-earner model is the cultural norm. Yet an unadjusted gender wage gap of roughly fifteen percent persists. The question is why, and more specifically, why the gap looks so different depending on where you sit in the occupational hierarchy and whether you have children. Two definitions do most of the analytical work here. Occupational prestige is measured using Treiman's Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale, or SIOPS, which is a continuous score running from thirteen to seventy-eight that ranks occupations by their social standing across countries. Time-consuming job characteristics are the second key concept.

These include overnight business travel, working overtime frequently, unpaid overtime expectations, and the number of subordinates managed. The logic is that these demanding conditions are also wage-promoting ones; they tend to cluster in high-paying roles and may themselves drive pay differences between workers who hold them and those who do not. The empirical findings break down into three layers. First, marriage pays off for both sexes. Controlling for other factors, the wage premium for being married or cohabiting is positive for women and slightly larger for men. Second, parenthood diverges sharply by gender. The parenthood coefficient for women is negative — minus eight percent — while for men it is positive at around seven percent. Third, the male parenthood bonus is not spread evenly across the occupational ladder. It appears almost entirely at the top, in occupations scoring between sixty-six and seventy-eight on the SIOPS scale, where the fatherhood coefficient reaches zero point twenty-one and actually grows to zero point twenty-four after adding controls for time-consuming conditions. That last detail matters. Fathers do have greater access than childless men to time-consuming, wage-promoting jobs: more unpaid overtime and more subordinates. But adding those controls does not shrink the fatherhood premium.

It expands it. So whatever is driving the bonus, it is not simply that fathers work longer or manage more people. For women, the story is different: accounting for time-consuming conditions does reduce the prestige-based gender gap, from about twenty-three percent to sixteen percent in high-prestige occupations. Magnusson and Nermo flag two candidate explanations: selection, meaning more career-oriented men may sort into fatherhood, and employer treatment, meaning firms may reward fathers as presumed breadwinners. Their data cannot separate these. However, in a country with some of the world's most egalitarian labor policies, the fact that parenthood still splits men's and women's wage trajectories so cleanly is the finding that sticks. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.

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