ORIGENDER · The Origen of Gender Inequality: Nurture vs. Nature and Quantifying Gender Preference

The Origen of Gender Inequality: Nurture vs. Nature and Quantifying Gender Preference

Women today still earn significantly less than men. Even in the Scandinavian countries, who long have been considered forerunners in gender equality, the gender pay gap has fallen only marginally over the past two-three decades. The persistence of the remaining gender pay gap has received wide attention from both policy makers and academia, and a number of countries and institutions have the direct aim of fostering gender equality. This includes the European Union, where gender equality is included as a stated objective in Horizon 2020, and countries increasingly adopt policies that directly “force” greater gender equality, a salient example being the recent adoption of earmarked parental leave at the EU level. One explanation for gender inequality in the labor market focus on the role of human capital and discrimination, but the reduction of gender differences in education and the implementation of anti-discrimination policies suggest that the explanation for the remaining gender gap lies elsewhere. Hence, scholars increasingly highlight the importance of gender identity and norms in shaping labor market outcomes. In ORIGENDER, I advance our understanding of the role of gender norms in shaping the gender pay gap by answering two key questions: First, given the importance that gender roles play, it is natural to ask why gender roles on the labor market still are so traditional – in particular in families with children? Second, can we directly quantify how much individuals value traditional gender roles? The answers to these questions constitute a significant leap compared to our current understanding and will eventually help us design better policies to foster gender equality. ORIGENDER has advanced our understand in two ways: First, by comparing the labor market trajectories of men and women in biological and adoptive families using event studies around the arrival of children and almost forty years of administrative adoption data from Denmark we find that short-run child penalties are slightly larger for biological mothers than for adoptive mothers, but their long-run child penalties are virtually identical and precisely estimated. This suggests that biology is not a key driver of child-related gender gaps. Instead this result add to the cumulative evidence on the importance of norms and social behavior. Second, using Danish register data on almost 200,000 births combined with sharp variation in economic incentives created by the parental leave benefit system we study how the design of parental leave benefits affect the division of leave among parents. A key insight from this work is that the replacement rate plays an important role in ensuring that fathers take up leave earmarked to them.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union