7 - Motherhood and wages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Introduction
In many industrialised countries, women's educational levels and labour force participation have increased strikingly in recent decades and equal pay legislation was brought into force in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the stagnation in gender wage equalisation that has occurred after a sharp improvement has led to an increasing focus on the effects of family responsibilities on women's wages as one of the explanations of the apparent paradox of this stagnation. The original empirical model of wage determination was developed in Mincer (1974), based on a lifecycle earnings model, and contains only age as a measure of the individual work history and years of pre-labour-market schooling. This model is most appropriate for samples of men taken from the entire population who are working practically all their lives. In this chapter we are interested in motherhood and wages, and therefore we wish to focus not only on the effect of personal characteristics such as investments in education, but also on household characteristics, and the effect of the labour market and social policies (see Part I).
The Mincer type models, the question of what variables to include in the wage model and gender wage discrimination have already been reviewed extensively (Cain 1986; Blau and Ferber 1987; Gundarson 1989; Blau 1998; Kunze 2000).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Policies, Labour Markets and MotherhoodA Comparative Analysis of European Countries, pp. 225 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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