PhD Economist SHUTS DOWN MAGA Lies On The Wage Gap

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:05]We are pleased to be joined by Sari Kerr, a PhD economist and researcher, as well as author or co-author on the paper when the kids grow up that we are really excited to discuss today looking at women's employment and earnings across the family cycle. I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

[00:00:23]>> Thank you for having me.

[00:00:25]>> Of course, and the pleasure's all ours.

[00:00:26]So, I I do want to start with the question about mothers compared to fathers as I think many might think, well, maybe it's just a problem that stems from parenthood itself, but your parent or your paper establishes, obviously, women make less than men. We know that the gender pay gap exists, and this seems to be the same for mothers compared to fathers. Could you kind of just detail that broadly what the gap is, and then maybe we can get into the individual pieces that cause it?

[00:00:52]>> Yes, so we our paper is looking at the gender pay gap and especially the parental pay gap across the family life cycle. So, from ages when you parents are in their mid-20s all the way to the mid-50s.

[00:01:08]And we try to break down the the pay gap between moms and dads into different components. So, what part of that is just general pay gap between men and women, what part comes from the what we call the motherhood penalty, so moms making less money than than the non-moms, and then what part of that is from sort of this what we call it the fatherhood premium, like dads actually make more money than other men.

[00:01:39]>> And so, yeah, there's those three parts of it.

[00:01:42]Which one do you think does the most damage in the long term, or do you think that it's more more beneficial to look at it as like the three together?

[00:01:51]>> I think I think it was interesting, and we didn't really didn't have a clear frontrunner in our minds when we started splitting it up. It's not It's not sort of one answer to it. It's more nuanced, right? So, we um when men and women are young, um they might be different drivers to the overall gap than when they are at older ages. So, um it again, like we we can maybe dig uh dig further into it. So, that I think that was the nice nice thing we found it. The overall gap is interesting, but I think it's also really interesting to understand that different things at different points in the family's life cycle kind of are the most important.

[00:02:33]>> Yeah, and kind of on I I would assume this goes into the the father premium, as you called it. Um why do you think it is that fathers continue to pull ahead in wages, as I think as your paper paper says, even when mothers are able to bring their hours back up, that uh the wage gap still persists?

[00:02:51]>> Exactly. So, that that's an interesting question, and lots of people have tried to think about it in different ways.

[00:02:58]I think some of it is um is due to what we call selection. So, peop- uh men who are perhaps you know, most stable in terms of employment and earnings, and are able to support a family, are those who are then going to go ahead and start a family. And that's sort of it's selection into fatherhood could be driving some of it. Um some of it is uh also by need, especially in a country like the US. So, if you have a family, you um find out quickly that that can be expensive. You have to provide insurance. You might have to save for the children's education, uh daycare, all kinds of expensive things.

[00:03:39]So, dads need to work more hours, I think they find that in order to provide for the family.

[00:03:46]Some of it is employer attitudes. There was many studies who that have looked at what employers think. They look at look at the um pool of workers and they say, "Oh, who should I promote? Well, this guy, he's going to stay. He has a family and a mortgage and and he's the guy that I want to be maybe promoting. Maybe he deserves a raise. He's working hard to provide for the family." So, I think it it's a combination of factors, really.

[00:04:14]>> Yeah, and I guess to to dig more in then on the mother's side, what were the things that you were saying that even when we're getting our hours or they're getting their hours back that the the wage parity isn't there, that there's still a discrepancy. Like, what is it more like of like a culture of the workplace, a structure with like schedule like rigid schedules and expectations? What kind of drives that being the cause?

[00:04:37]>> I know. So, that's again, I think it's a combination of factors that I think our workplaces are still often geared around this idea that at least one parent has more flexibility or maybe there's a piste at home parent and the workplace expects the worker to be there be doing a lot of face time and and turns out that school schedules don't really operate the same the way as the workplace schedule. So, somebody somebody has to be able to kind of take more time off and work fewer hours. So, some of it comes from those dynamic effects of there being I think there's a default parent who often happens to be the mother and that that reflects in the workplace.

[00:05:21]I'm sure there's a lot of attitudes again by the employers if they're thinking about again and like who should we train for leadership role?

[00:05:31]I want to train someone who's going to be there, who's going to going to if their vision is that mothers are more likely to drop out or start working part-time that affects those attitudes as well. Um and some big part I I it's just that the parenting hours and the work hours, they only have 24 hours a day and they're all pulling from the same 24 hours.

[00:05:54]>> I'm I'm curious then on that. Do you think with I I think you know, a common critique, maybe the first thing you hear when people talk about the the gender pay gap is, oh well, maybe women choose jobs that that just pay less and this and that. How much of this, like what you were just discussing, do you think is more of like societal pressures from things like motherhood because of the structures of the workplace that kind of force this rather than it being an individual choice?

[00:06:20]>> Yes, so exactly. Like, if you are I think it's definitely true that if if you're thinking long-term that family is in the cards, then perhaps you are going to think about jobs that will allow more flexibility. So, we have a lot of women in teaching roles and in the public sector and jobs like that that perhaps allow a little bit more temporal flexibility when needed. So, there's some of that um and then the question is like, what you know, why don't we have more jobs that have more family-friendly hours and more flexibility. I think it did sort of that those are the norms. I think in the US, that seems to be the norm. If you look at many other countries, the work week is fewer hours, the vacation times are much longer. There's sort of inbuilt societal understanding that families take more time and here we have often very minimal annual vacation time and it's interesting how that like where that came from and why that that hasn't really changed.

[00:07:23]>> Yeah, and on more of the things that your paper found, I know you looked at I believe both college-educated and non-college-educated.

[00:07:31]Could you kind of go into like how much of a role education played? Did the discrepancy still exist? What did you find?

[00:07:37]>> Yes, so the it's interesting like everyone always thinks that college education can solve so many problems. I will you know earn higher wages, I'll have a nicer job. Many many great things do come with college education. So it's interesting to note that sometimes things don't look much rosier for the college educated women than they do for the non-college educated. But the reason is that college educated men are just really high earners with fast career trajectories, especially during the the time period that we looked at. That's sort of a lot of it is coming just from the fact that the the men's careers take off soon after graduation and continue growing.

[00:08:19]And so the pay gaps are actually much larger among the college educated. They they grow much faster and stay much larger.

[00:08:28]For the non-college educated again it one might think all of that doesn't look so bad, you know, compared to gender pay gap it's much smaller. But that comes from the fact that the non-college educated men are doing so well in the labor market. Their real wages haven't increased. Their their jobs are the kind that don't really lead to a lot of promotions and great deal of earnings increases over time. So yes, the gender pay gap may be smaller among the parental pay gap among the non-college graduates, but it that's again coming from the lower earnings of the men.

[00:09:06]>> And then how could you detail kind of how this looks throughout the different stages of the family cycle? Like how much of the gap gets made up as the the child gets older? How much is even possible for them to make up, you know, versus remains?

[00:09:20]>> Yes, so the I'm trying to think about what good way to summarize it. So when we start in our So most of the analysis start in the early to mid-20s for college educated.

[00:09:32]We try to start right after the college ends and then try to understand what happens um to the pay gap in the ensuing years.

[00:09:42]So, what happens uh pretty quickly after college um college uh grads graduate, the pay gap starts growing right away, um and then continues to grow actually into the sort of peak earnings years, which tend to be in the mid-40s, kind of around 45, and then the pay gap flattens.

[00:10:04]Same thing sort of Same thing happens on the non-college side, but things happen earlier. The peak happens earlier, and sort of the the big bulk of the pay gap is already set in when people are about 35 to 39 years old.

[00:10:18]And then if we think about the the family life cycle and that um the pay gap say stays quite large until the kids start to be in middle school and start kind of heading into high school. That's typically happens when um the parents are in their mid-to-late 40s, and then some small shrinkage in the pay gap happens uh between moms and dads, especially um in the very um very end of our sample when in this women men are in their 50s, mid-50s.

[00:10:50]There's a little bit more shrinkage between the moms and versus non-moms, but similar sort of time pattern that first we see very large increases in the pay gap and then very modest declines as the kids start to be in the middle school, high school, and heading to college.

[00:11:07]>> And something I was really curious to ask, I'm not even sure if your paper looked exactly into it, if you've done research on it specifically, but with motherhood, maybe comparing to women that are are not mothers, um how much like does motherhood cause a a gap there? And even when, you know, your child gets older and maybe moves out of the home, are they like mothers ever able to even close the gap between women who never have kids?

[00:11:32]>> Yes, so the moms versus never moms, there definitely is a gap there as well.

[00:11:38]Um and that's uh it does uh it again it it's not nowhere near as big as the gap between moms versus dads. Uh it's I would say about 30% bigger but at the largest um point when women are in their uh moms and non-moms are in their late um 30s and early 40s, but moms make about 40% sorry, 30% less than non-moms and a lot of that um is explained by the moms working fewer hours. Their labor market experience is grow not growing as fast. They work fewer hours.

[00:12:15]Um and then as the moms can increase their hours again, kids are getting older, you don't have to work as much part-time, you actually can take on more of a full-time role perhaps, um that gap shrinks to about let's say uh so 12 to 15%. So it doesn't ever fully um fully disappear at least for the college educated moms, but it does shrink.

[00:12:39]>> And then you the the last question that I have and this is obviously, you know, the million-dollar question. Um what are the sort of things that would alleviate the pressures that cause these gaps? Is it maybe like policy-wise things like universal child care or paid or paid family leave? Is it more like cultural in the workplace like some of the things we talked about like how do we correctly address the issue?

[00:13:03]>> Yes, that's that is the million-dollar question and if I could if I had the perfect answer, I would I would offer it. But there are many many ways in which we could improve things. So I think definitely having um having paid family leave and having access to affordable child care are two very important things. With the family leave, I I it's important to think about not just that the mothers are taking the family leave, but to the extent that that can be shared perhaps by policy decisions. Like it becomes a take it or leave it and every parent should be expected to take some part of that leave that that would reduce the um the effect of just women taking family leave since that can also be detrimental, especially if the leaves are long. Um and then that sort of question about attitudes, I think it also is the same thing with the with the fathers taking leave. Um for you know, there should be some expectation in the workplaces that that you know, if you become a father, you take leave. It's not something that should be penalized.

[00:14:08]It should not be thought as a negative thing for parents to take time off.

[00:14:13]Um Claudia Golden was one of the co-authors of the papers paper as um provided some interesting ideas about the division of work in the US workplaces that we think about the types of jobs that are most equal in terms of pay gaps. They're often those where work can be easily passed on from one team member to another. So being being away for a little bit or not being there all the time and with luck you know, here I am in the workplace. Uh those types of jobs can provide a lot better better balance and um less less gap in terms of the gender pay gaps in the workplace. So again, not all jobs are probably such that they can be transformed in that way, but if we can think about more flexible workplace practices that allow people to take time off without huge penalties, that could definitely help.

[00:15:08]>> Yeah, and before I let you go, I I always ask people this. Um I I found you obviously through your co-author, so I'm not sure if this applies to you but um I give people the floor. I don't if you have like work you want to shout out, your social media, like a website, anything like that, you can have the floor to let people know if you'd like.

[00:15:24]>> Yes, so I I work at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, which is a women's college, and we we do a lot of interesting work on different policy. So, any anyone who wants to look me up, it's pretty easy to find the Wellesley Centers for Women, Sally Cur.

[00:15:43]All my research is posted on my website, and I'm happy to chat about any of the policy-related issues that we have studied in the last several years.

[00:15:54]>> Awesome, and yeah, it was a wonderful conversation. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. We would love to get you back on sometime in the future for one of those other papers.

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