① Women have historically been paid less. But in the US in the 1980s, they began to catch up—fast. During that decade, the gender pay gap closed by about one percentage point a year. Had that trend continued, the gender wage gap would have been closed by 2017.
② But the trend didn’t continue, and the gap remains yawning.
③ According to a new study from academics at Harvard, the stagnation can be put down, perhaps counterintuitively, to the introduction of state and federal family leave policies.
④ The academics argue that during the 1990s, as governments began to introduce leave policies, it was mainly women who took advantage of them. Though the leave policies might have helped those women to stay in the workplace—instead of dropping out to have families—those who returned saw their wages had increased at lower rates than the men.
⑤ After family leave was introduced in the US, in fact, the rate of gender wage convergence fell to just 0.03 percentage points per year, and has remained there ever since.
⑥ Those monitoring the process towards salary equity at work have long watched as progress slowed in many countries around the world. In fact, that progress began to reverse during the pandemic (大流行病).
⑦ The gender pay gap is one of the most outstanding examples of that lack of parity (平等), and still exists just about everywhere. The motherhood penalty has become a shorthand for describing why: In many places, especially rich countries, women earn the same as men until they reach their childbearing years. Women who have children begin to see their salaries slip behind their male counterparts.
⑧ Part of this is because women take on more of the umpaid labor at home, which can eat into time available for work and energy for career advancement. But it’s also because mothers are passed over for raises and promotion, and because time out of the workplace sets women back, even if that time is taken voluntarily, and supported by company or government policy.
⑨ What would have happened if leave policies hadn’t been introduced? The study doesn’t go into that question, other than to say that if the 1980s trend continued, we would have been at parity by now.
⑩ It’s possible, however, that the journey towards wage parity would have stalled either way. If women’s gains in the 1980s were made through the erasure of things like bias, once those less uncontrollable problems had been addressed, there would still have been an issue with women—who are the ones to bear children and take care of them in the early weeks because of biological factors like the ability to breastfeed, forcing them to take breaks, whether or not those breaks were mandated.
