Author : Caroline Johnson
Release : 2022
Genre : Public policy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Relationship Between Paid Maternity Leave and the Gender Wage Gap: A Country-Level Analysis by : Caroline Johnson
Download or read book The Relationship Between Paid Maternity Leave and the Gender Wage Gap: A Country-Level Analysis written by Caroline Johnson. This book was released on 2022. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While recent decades have witnessed progress toward greater gender equality worldwide, an average gender wage gap of over 12% still exists in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Although paid maternity leave has been proposed as a policy approach for advancing pay equity, existing literature suggests that longer maternity leave entitlements are generally associated with wider gender wage gaps. I use country-level panel data on all 38 OECD countries through 2018 to investigate the relationship between paid maternity leave and the gender wage gap. Because the most recent study in this area only used data for 22 OECD countries through 2010, this paper represents a geographic and temporal expansion on previous work. I also contribute to the literature by focusing specifically on the length of paid, rather than employment-protected, leave. In contrast to the existing scholarship on this topic, I find evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship, in which relatively shorter leave entitlements are associated with widening gender wage gaps, while relatively longer policies are associated with narrowing wage gaps. However, this relationship is very small in magnitude, suggesting that maternity leave policies may not be an effective means of changing the gender wage gap.
