During the recent UK election campaign, the Labour Party vowed to “close the gender pay gap once and for all.” In the US, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has said that the gender pay gap acts as a “virtual tax” on women, declaring that closing it “is not just a moral issue, it’s also a business one.” In the EU, a new Pay Transparency Directive aims to close the gap by highlighting pay disparities and encouraging greater accountability.
Popular among celebrities and activists, the crusade to close the gender pay gap is presented as a matter of eradicating a societal injustice; an ideologically neutral cause that we can all get behind. Achieving equality, we are told, is just a case of putting in place the right policies and legislation, shaking off the relics of a discriminatory past, and helping women move up the career ladder.
But is it that simple? What exactly is the gender pay gap? And why, after at least two decades of gender equality legislation in Europe and most of the developed world, is the gender pay gap persisting, or even widening?
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, the gender pay gap is not unequal pay for equal work. That is discrimination and is usually prohibited by legislation. Rather, the gender pay gap is the average difference in hourly pay between men and women in the labour force or within a particular organisation, sector, or industry. There are significant variations in the size of the gender pay gap depending on what period of time is measured, the location, the type of work and level of occupation. The size of the gap is also wider at certain points in the life course. While relatively rare, some job types or positions exhibit reverse gender pay gaps, meaning women earn more than men. Overall, though, women do consistently earn less than men: 13 percent less per hour in the EU and 16 percent in the US. This gap has stayed relatively stable for at least two decades, despite significant attempts to achieve gender pay equity through public policy.
Over-emphasizing gender and under-estimating motherhood is leading us around in circles. Because policy makers are so reluctant to acknowledge sex differences as anything more than stereotypes, they have become divorced from reality. In the rush to apply the blunt ideological tool of equality to minimise the maternal role, we risk ignoring the hinge point of the gender pay gap: motherhood.
The Motherhood Penalty
When governments proclaim they want to “close the gap,” they should be clear about what that would involve and what their own figure represents. For one thing, a narrow gender pay gap does not necessarily reflect gender “equality” in a given society. We might see a surprisingly narrow pay gap in countries with a low rate of female labour participation, for example, because the relatively few women who do work tend not to have children, and therefore their career trajectories more closely mirror those of men. The gender pay gaps in Denmark and Sweden—countries ranked highly according to gender equality indices and where female labour force participation is high—are 12 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Compare that with Italy and Romania, more traditional countries, both with gaps of 4 percent.
What’s more, pay gaps are calculated from the income data of those currently in paid employment. They do not account for economically “inactive” stay-at-home parents or full-time caregivers, the majority of whom are mothers. Since economists tend to be interested in the unexplained aspects of wage gaps such as discrimination or occupational effects, they prefer to use hourly wage as a measure, thereby accounting for the effect of differences in working time between men and women. If longer period measures were used such as monthly or annual earnings, gender pay gaps would be much wider as these would reflect women’s time out of work or relatively fewer working hours per week compared to men.
When measured via hourly wages however, the gender pay gap reflects a situation in which the jobs women tend to do tend to pay less. This is termed “occupational segregation”: the idea that men and women self-select into different occupations. Jobs that are traditionally seen as women’s work are, in general, lower paid. It is for this reason that encouraging women into leadership positions, onto boards, and into better paid sectors form key aspects of policy to address gender pay gaps. Yet even where these policies are successful, what tends to happen is that women without children rise up the ranks more quickly and easily. With the focus on gender only, data on parent status or number of children are not widely collected or considered in most organisational DEI strategies and so mothers, especially mothers of more than one child, tend to remain in lower paid positions.
This leads to a second, interrelated, factor behind the gender pay gap: the cost of flexibility. Jobs that demand in-person attendance, being on-call, being un-substitutable, travel, long hours, or intense competition pay more, in general, than those that don’t. Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin notes that women with children are funnelled away from these higher paying “greedy” jobs and into lower-paid positions that offer greater leeway to respond to the demands of children. Goldin calls on employers to address the cost of flexibility and redefine performance so as not to disadvantage mothers and unpaid caregivers in the workforce. For most organisations facing pressure to publish their pay gaps however, it is easier to recruit a few women into higher paid roles than to focus on the more specific challenges faced by mothers.
What About the Men?
Women still carry out the massive bulk of childcare, domestic and reproductive labour in the unpaid sphere and, in addition, the female-dominated caring, teaching, health, and service sectors of the economy tends to be low paid. If the gender pay gap is to be closed by women moving into higher paid roles in the labour market, who will do this work? Will men do it?
Despite efforts to encourage men to join the “HEAL” professions, they represent only 7 percent of childcare workers and 12 percent of paid elder carers in the EU, with similar figures in the US. Whether reflective of supply or demand (the supply of male care workers is low, and demand for male carers might also be low), availability or preference, the fact remains that women carry out at least 80 percent of all care-related work in the economy, as well as being the primary carers at home.
For academics and policy makers this is a problem to solve, mere proof that people hold onto “harmful” or “faulty” stereotypes which, if dealt with, would ease men’s wholesale transition into carer roles at home and at work. One 2015 paper on low male representation in European preschool roles writes that greater awareness of “embodied subjectivities is needed to overcome essentialist conceptions of differences between body and mind, women and men.” While there is an element of truth to this, and unfair or negative gendered stereotypes do exist and can be problematic, is this the entire issue at play here? Might it be the case that personal sex-based preferences around care do exist, are valid and are likely to be robust to efforts to educate them away?
After all, despite decades of programs and policies aimed at encouraging men to become equal partners on the home front, they have not done so at nearly the pace at which women have moved in the other direction. Men continue their working lives largely unimpeded by—in fact, facilitated by —their marital and parental status, while women are split between those who can afford to outsource caring and domestic labour and those who cannot.
The key question thus becomes: can, and should, men do half of all childcare and reproductive labour in society? If you move away from lofty academic discussions of subjectivities and embodied realities, for most families there are reasons—real, practical reasons—why men do not, indeed cannot, do half of all caring. Men do not gestate or birth babies, they don’t breastfeed them, and in the infant stages, in most cases, they are best suited to play a support role, physically and financially, to the mother.
Yet this is not a popular opinion. Rather, it has become more fashionable to assume that maternal instinct or mothers unique and irreplaceable role is just another “socially constructed” idea. Although scientific literature affirms that there is a complex and unique biological connection between mothers and children, social science and popular media pushes a narrative of entirely sex-neutral parenthood. Ask most mothers, though, and chances are, they will tell a different story. Indeed, even a cursory glance at Mumsnet, Tik Tok, or Instagram accounts of family life will show women experiencing all the tiny, nuanced minutiae of sex differences in the allocation of care within the home. As sociologist Catherine Hakim puts it, “symmetrical sex roles are a minority taste.” Worldwide, the male breadwinner/female primary caregiver or secondary earner remains the most common household arrangement, even in those countries with the most established gender equality policies.
Of course, stay-at-home dads should be supported and encouraged. If that arrangement works best for an individual family, that’s fantastic. For the majority of families, though, it does not and the preference is for mothers to carry out fewer, not more hours in paid work. Yes, preferences can be subject to change and gender-role expectations can be picked apart to some extent. But even if you take culture or gender role preferences out of the equation, the reality is that pregnancy and childbirth can and often do result in health complications, physical exhaustion, or energy depletion for the mother. If she is the primary or sole breadwinner, this adds additional layers of complication at the household level.
Equal, Not Interchangeable
This is where we venture into territory that the gender pay gap discussion often avoids, territory linked to other broader debates around sex and gender. Are women and men interchangeable in every context? Are they the same? Is the idea that women are the primary carers in society a mere stereotype or social role that can and should be altered? Or does it reflect a more substantial reality, one that is resistant to change through socialization or legislation? If sex differences are real and there are legitimate reasons why women continue to act as the primary caregiver in so many different societies, then how can equality in terms of access to careers, wealth, and public life be maintained? And whose responsibility is it to maintain it?
We can minimise the gender pay gap through many of the policies put forward by Goldin and others. We can address the cost of flexibility, remove barriers to women’s progression at work, and encourage involved fatherhood and increased domestic labour by men through shared parental leave and other workplace policies. We can explore pay and performance structures that might negatively impact mothers. Yet if, as we do all this, we pretend that motherhood is not something transformative, disruptive, and unique to women, then we are just going around in circles.
When we send the message that motherhood should not impact your working life or that it is a role that can be played just as easily by others, we end up putting mothers under more pressure. The last thirty years of gender equality policy has sought to minimise the mother role to create a level playing field in the workplace. Yet this relentless push to value paid over domestic work hasn’t balanced household divisions of labour. Instead, it has left mothers feeling exhausted and overworked, seeking patched-together childcare solutions, cut off from support systems and communities, all the while being told that the real problem is that they’re not climbing the career ladder fast enough.
Econometric models of gender wage gaps measure things like utility and consider time out of work as a precise estimation of the resulting lost earnings. But motherhood just does not fit into these models. Mother’s preferences and need for time with our children can supersede many other considerations. Even housework is too intertwined with caring for its true value to be captured by economic calculations. Too often, we ignore this enormous, time-consuming and vital part of human labour and assume that it can be either outsourced or ignored.
Why not ask mothers what they really want? What would really make their lives easier? The answer is probably not more female board members or inspiring female CEOs. It’s probably things like longer paid maternity leave, a generous child benefit, understanding and supportive managers, the ability to work from home, job-sharing, or flex time for both parents to accommodate school drop offs and pick-ups.
The current gender pay gap and gender equality narrative assumes that a completely equal division of labour within households and across society is achievable and desirable. In academic, policy-making, and liberal feminist circles, there is a tangible reluctance or trepidation around suggesting that there is something special about motherhood, lest we offend, reduce, “essentialise,” or—even more terrifying— signal conservativism to our colleagues and peers. We fear that if we acknowledge that women do the bulk of childcare and domestic work, we are making it so, or that by saying that maternal instinct is real that we are saying that all women experience it. This is not the case. Tendencies are not absolutes. We can certainly aim for closer overlap of the two bell curves of male and female preferences and behaviours but it is counterproductive to assume those two distinct bell curves do not exist.
If we are serious about women’s financial security, social contribution, and participation, we need to understand what works for mothers as a distinct group. Wages are only one part of the picture. We should assess our fiscal, legal, and social welfare systems from the perspective of what offers the best protection and support for women and children. We should ask why two parents are often forced to work full time to afford necessities such as housing or healthcare. We should discuss the devaluing of community and the breakup of extended families and support systems for mothers as people relocate to seek work. Unfortunately, such complex questions are not as appealing as easy soundbites about gender pay gaps.
In the end, we can and should minimise the gender pay gap, but we might never eliminate it, especially if we continue to insist that gender, rather than motherhood, is the pivotal factor.
