Gender Pay Gap: Frauen ohne Kinder verdienen mehr als Männer

Ein interessanter Artikel legt noch einmal dar, dass „Geschlecht“ ein unwichtigerer Faktor ist als „Aussetzen wegen der Kinder“:

June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, concluded in a 2005 study that “there is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.”

That needs a bit more explaining and comes from this paper:

Table 9 (last column) further highlights the relative importance of family responsibilities versus labor market discrimination by examining the gender gap among men and women in apparently similar lifetime family situations—namely men and women who were never married and never had a child. In this case, the unadjusted gender gap is actually positive—women earn about 8% more than their male counterparts. This observation is an important one because it suggests that the factors underlying the gender gap in pay primarily reflect choices made by men and women given their different societal roles, rather than labor market discrimination against women due to their sex.

Never-married men and never-married women without children are similar in that they are not responsible for the financial support of a family as are most married men. Nor do they have the of responsibility of child care that is usually assumed by women with children. However, never-married women have better credentials than never-married men with respect to education, AFQT scores and even years of work experience (Table 11). But never-married men are not notably inferior to other men. In fact, compared to other men a higher proportion of never-married men are college graduates and they have about the same AFQT scores. When we control for these differences in characteristics, the gender gap in favor of women is eliminated, but the negative coefficient is small and is not statistically significant.

Wenn man also Männer und Frauen vergleicht, die weder verheiratet sind noch Kinder haben, dann verdienen Frauen sogar mehr, bereinigt verdienen dann beide gleich viel.

Zu den Gründen weiter:

The division of labor in the family is less delineated than it once was and a majority of women with children now work in the market. Nonetheless, women on average still assume greater responsibility for child rearing than men, and that responsibility is associated with a lower extent and continuity of market work. In addition, the expectation and assumption of home responsibilities influence choice of occupation and preferences for working conditions that facilitate a dual career, combining work at home and work in the market. A significant literature has investigated the effect of work in the home on women’s lifetime patterns of labor force participation and the effect of labor force discontinuities on wages.15 Women with children devote relatively more of their energy to home responsibilities than women without children and as a result earn lower wages. On the other hand, married men earn higher wages than other men. Although that effect may be partly endogenous—women may shun low earners as husbands—it is a plausible consequence of the division of labor in the home, which leads men to take greater responsibility for providing the family’s money income and consequently to work longer, more continuously and possibly harder.

Und ihre Schlußfolgerung:

Our conclusion thus has to be that the gender pay gap that we’re seeing isn’t a result of societal discrimination against women (nor of such discrimination in favor of fathers, something that no one at all is complaining it is) but instead a result of the choices that people make about how the kids are going to be cared for and who does it.

This might, of course, still be something that we want to do something about. But if it’s not the employers discriminating then shouting at employers not to discriminate isn’t going to make any difference. And if it really is true that as a mammalian and viviparous species then we’ve a natural tendency to split child care and market earnings in an asymmetric manner then, well, it’s going to require a rather large change in either human nature or behavior to achieve, isn’t it? And thus it might just be, this gender pay gap, one of these things that just doesn’t have a solution.

 Auch insoweit nicht neues.

vgl. auch:

• Gehaltsunterschiede Mann Frau
• Gehaltsunterschiede Mann Frau nur 5%
• Hymowitz zum Gender Pay Gap
• Gender Gap bei Homosexuellen
• Und Nochmal: Gender Pay Gap
• „Gender Ambitionen Gap“ statt „Gender Pay Gap“
• Frauen, Risikobereitschaft und der Gender Pay Gap
• Gehaltsunterschiede von Männern und Frauen (Gender Pay Gap)
• Crumar und Teardown zum Gender Pay Gap
• Sargon of Akkad: Gender Pay Gap Verschwörungstheoretiker
• David zum Gender Gap
• 70% der Frauen und 77% der Männer glauben nicht, dass Frauen für gleiche Arbeit weniger verdienen
• Der Gender Pay Gap im Osten: Sind Ostdeutsche weniger sexistisch?
• Die regionalen Unterschiede im „Gender Pay Gap“ in Deutschland (im Osten verdienen Frauen teilweise mehr als Männer)
• Antwort des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt zum niedrigeren Gender Pay Gap im Osten
• Gender Pay Gap in den Bundesländern und Europa
• Grafik zu Privilegien und Gender Pay Gap
• Der Gender Pay Gap (Der Doktorant)
• Feminismus und Gender Pay Gap und das „Argument, das an Nichtwissen appelliert“