The Gender Pay Gap Is a Culture Problem

American women made significant progress toward closing the gender pay gap in the second half of the 20th century, but that gap has barely budged over the past two decades. In 2022, according to Pew Research, “American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. That was about the same as in 2002, when they earned 80 cents to the dollar.”

In a country where women are now a (slight) majority of the college-educated labor force and the annual earnings median for college degree holders is 55 percent more than that of those with high school diplomas, the stickiness of this gap is frustrating. While there are several factors at play, one of the key contributors to the gap is what’s known as the motherhood penalty and the corresponding fatherhood premium: Women’s pay decreases when they have children, while men’s pay increases.

This dynamic isn’t just an American phenomenon. “In general, women don’t recover. They don’t catch back up to men, even many years after first childbirth,” said Henrik Kleven, the lead author of a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “The Child Penalty Atlas,” in which he and his co-authors, Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante, reviewed wage gap data from 134 countries. “Now, that basic pattern is true essentially everywhere, but the quantitative magnitudes of the effects vary greatly across countries,” he told me recently.

Somewhat surprisingly to me, his research, which builds on years of earlier scholarship, suggests that a country’s family policy has relatively little to do with how big the parenthood pay gap is. A society’s culture and norms seem to be much bigger factors in how big the motherhood penalty is: The more egalitarian the culture, the lower the gap.

Kleven told me that sometimes countries that seem superficially similar in terms of income levels, development, family policy and geography have very different pay gaps. (We see the same interplay in American states, with the child penalty 21 percent in Vermont and 61 percent in Utah.) Even countries right next to each other can have wildly different gaps. Spain’s child pay gap is much bigger than Portugal’s, and Germany’s is bigger than Denmark’s. Central European countries have “some of the highest child penalties we see anywhere in the world,” Kleven said. Scandinavian countries have some of the lowest.

Let’s look at Austria. It has generous family leave policies and child care subsidies, especially by American standards. But in a 2022 working paper, “Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence From 60 Years of Policy Experimentation,” Kleven and his co-authors’ analysis showed “that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.” Despite an influx of Austrian women into the work force in the past 50 or so years, the relatively large child penalty can be at least partly explained by gender attitudes and norms.