Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber – Techs Gender Gap Report Read the following articles and review James Damore’s (2017) “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber

Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber – Techs Gender Gap Report Read the following articles and review James Damore’s (2017) “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” to provide sociological insights to tech’s gender gap, what would you report based on the readings fromthe reading and your sociological expertise?about a two paragraph Long Work Hours, Part-­Time
Work, and Trends in the
Gender Gap in Pay, the
Motherhood Wage
Penalty, and the Fatherhood
Wage Premium
K im A. W eeden, You ngjoo Ch a, a n d M aur icio Bucca
We assess how changes in the social organization and compensation of work hours over the last three decades are associated with changes in wage differentials among mothers, fathers, childless women, and childless men. We find that large differences between gender and parental status groups in long work hours (fifty
or more per week), coupled with sharply rising hourly wages for long work hours, contributed to rising gender
gaps in wages (especially among parents), motherhood wage penalties, and fatherhood wage premiums.
Changes in the representation of these groups in part-­time work, by contrast, is associated with a decline in
the gender gap in wages among parents and in the motherhood wage penalty, but an increase in the fatherhood wage premium. These findings offer important clues into why gender and family wage differentials still
persist.
Keywords: gender inequality, family wage gap, gender wage gap, motherhood wage penalty,
fatherhood wage premium, work hours, long work hours, overwork
After converging relatively rapidly in the 1970s
and 1980s, the gender gap in hourly wages
shrank only modestly over the next thirty-­five
years. Today, median weekly wages of full-­time
women are 83 percent of the median weekly
wages of men, an increase of just three percentage points since 2004 (BLS 2015). This
stalled convergence in the gender gap in wages
has led to a large and vibrant research literature that seeks to understand why change has
been so slow (England 2010).
One of the key empirical insights of this lit-
erature is that the gender gap in wages at the
aggregate level is perpetuated by persistent
gender differences in individual labor market
behaviors: whether men and women work for
pay, the occupations and industries in which
they work, and the number of hours per week
they work. These gender differences emerge in
the context of structural changes in the distribution of jobs with particular attributes (such
as expected work hours) and in the wages associated with these attributes, resulting in
complex and offsetting effects on the gender
Kim A. Weeden is Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University. Youngjoo Cha is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. Mauricio
Bucca is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University.
We thank Martha Bailey, Sheldon Danziger, Tom DiPrete, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Direct correspondence to: Kim Weeden at kw74@cornell.edu, 323 Uris
Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853; Youngjoo Cha at cha5@indiana.edu; and Mauricio Bucca at mebucca@gmail.com.
A one-­click Stata replication package for the analyses in this paper is available at www.kimweeden.com
/manuscripts.
72
a h a lf cen t ury of ch a nge in t he li v es of a mer ica n women
gap in wages.1 For example, Youngjoo Cha and
Kim Weeden (2014) show that the diffusion of
long work hours in the United States in the
1990s and 2000s, coupled with the persistent
gender gap in long work hours and rising
hourly compensation for long work hours,
was associated with an increase in the gender
gap in wages after adjusting for other wage-­
relevant attributes. These trends largely offset
wage-­equalizing shifts in women’s educational
attainment.
A second empirical insight is that much of
what appears to be a gender wage gap is better
understood as a gender-­specific family gap in
pay or, as they are known in the economic and
sociological literatures, the motherhood wage
penalty and fatherhood wage premium: mothers
earn less than observationally similar childless
women (Pal and Waldfogel, this volume; Waldfogel 1998; Budig and England 2001; Avellar
and Smock 2003; Gangl and Ziefle 2009; Staff
and Mortimer 2012; Cooke 2014; Kahn, Garcia-­
Manglano, and Bianchi 2014), and fathers earn
more than observationally similar childless
men (Pal and Waldfogel, this volume; Waldfogel 1998; Lundberg and Rose 2000; Glauber
2008; Killewald 2012). As in the broader gender
literature, the research on family wage differentials emphasizes wage-­relevant labor market
behaviors, including work hours, of parents
compared with childless adults. Curiously,
however, explicit efforts to tie trends in the distribution of work hours between mothers and
childless women, or between fathers and childless men, to trends in family wage gaps are relatively few and far between. Those that do typically emphasize shifts in the distribution of
parents and childless adults across part-­time
and full-­time work but ignore long work hours
(see, for example, Waldfogel 1998; Pal and
Waldfogel, this volume; Buchmann and McDaniel, this volume).
We bring together these two streams of
­research by describing the empirical relationship between trends in work hours in the
United States, the gender wage gap among
parents and among childless adults, and the
family wage gap among women and among
men. The first set of comparisons is motivated
by our expectation that changes in work hours
and in the hourly pay of different work hours
had a stronger association with the gender gap
in wages among parents than among childless
adults. The second set is motivated by our expectation that growth or decline in family
wage gaps result from the interplay of changes
in the distribution of work hours among parents and childless adults and structural
changes in the hourly pay associated with
part-­time work, full-­time work, and long work
hours.
We assess these expectations using nationally representative labor force data from the
Current Population Survey (CPS). First, we
briefly situate our analyses in the broader literatures on the sources of the stagnation in the
gender and family gap in wages.
Wo r k H o u r s a n d t h e G e n d e r
Wag e G a p
In accounting for the slow convergence in the
gender gap in wages over the last two decades,
gender scholars point to widespread cultural
beliefs about the existence of deeply rooted and
often biologically based differences in men’s
and women’s traits and skills (Charles and
Grusky 2004; Ridgeway 2011; Cotter, Hermsen,
and Vanneman 2011). These cultural beliefs affect men’s and women’s labor market decisions, employers’ hiring decisions, and institutional configurations such as the availability of
policies that would support workers who wish
to combine paid and unpaid labor. Because the
underlying cultural beliefs are slow to change,
so the argument goes, gender differences in the
labor market behaviors that generate a gender
gap in wages are also slow to change.
One implication of this argument is that the
proximate sources of the gender wage gap, and
of stagnation in the gender wage gap, are likely
1. We realize that one cannot safely interpret the results of wage equation models based on observational data
as causal, except under the implausible assumption that the observed covariates capture all wage-­relevant differences between mothers and fathers, for example, or between mothers and childless women. We use the term
effect sparingly. The exception is in our discussion of our decomposition models, where price change effect and
quantity change effect are standard terminology (see data and methods).
r s f : t h e ru s s e l l s a g e f o u n d at i o n j o u r n a l o f t h e s o c i a l s c i e n c e s
trends in the gender ga p
to be especially pronounced among parents.
After all, a core feature of gender essentialism
is the belief that women naturally excel at nurturance, personal service, and childrearing
(Charles and Grusky 2004, 19; Ridgeway and
Correll 2004). This stereotype makes it likely
that more mothers than fathers or childless
adults will devote a greater share of their time
to childrearing, more difficult for mothers to
avoid social sanctions if they do not curtail
their paid work hours during their childrearing
years, and less likely that employers will hire
mothers for jobs that require stereotypically
male-­t yped skills or work hours (Ridgeway and
Correll 2004).
This prediction is supported, albeit indirectly, by the empirical literature on the proximate sources of the gender gap in wages. Take,
for example, housework, which affects the time
and energy that is available for paid labor. The
housework time gaps between mothers and fathers are larger than the gaps among all adults
(Bianchi et al. 2012), and though a growing percentage of Americans state a preference for
egalitarian divisions of household labor (Gerson 2009; Pedulla and Thébaud 2015), parental
gaps in housework have stalled. Or, consider
discrimination, which affects wage gaps directly but also creates unequal opportunities
for workers to enter jobs with different levels
of pay and work hours. Although several audit
or other quasi-­experimental studies show evidence of gender discrimination in high status
occupations, others show that such discrimination is limited to mothers (Correll, Benard,
and Paik 2007).
The conflict between work and nonwork
roles may also be greater for mothers than it
is for fathers or childless adults. This is especially true in workplaces and occupations
where employers expect workers to put in long
hours, and where workers derive social status
from working long work hours (Jacobs and
Gerson 2004; Sharone 2004; Reid 2015). In
these settings, the ideal worker is someone
who is available to clients and supervisors at
all hours of the day or night, is able to travel
or relocate for work, and prioritizes career success over family or leisure (Williams 2000).
This image of an ideal worker is hard to reconcile with the stereotype of the ideal mother, a
73
mother who is available to her family at all
hours of the day or night, is able to travel or
relocate to support her children’s enrichment
activities, and prioritizes family over career
success. To be sure, fathers, childless men, and
childless women in “greedy organizations”
(Coser 1967) or occupations may also experience work-­life conflicts, but they are often
more able to “pass” as ideal workers, in part
because employers interpret their behavior
more favorably than identical behavior by
mothers (Reid 2015; Correll, Benard, and Paik
2007; Williams 2003). As a result, the gender
gap in long work hours among parents is likely
to be greater among parents than childless
adults and, given its roots in gender essentialist beliefs, also more resistant to change.
Organizational scholars have also noted
that a growing share of jobs are organized as
part-­time work, contingent work, temporary
work, contract work, and other “nonstandard
employment relations” that weaken any expectation, tacit or otherwise, that employees will
work a regular, forty-­hour work week (Kalleberg 2011). The growth of these nonstandard
employment relations, like the emergent culture of overwork, has different implications for
gender gaps in work hours among parents
than among childless adults. Historically, the
gender gap in part-­time work has been much
greater for parents than for childless adults:
mothers have long been more likely to work
part-­time than childless women, presumably
because part-­time work is easier to combine
with the time demands of childrearing; fathers, by contrast, have been much less likely
to work part time than childless men, perhaps
because of cultural expectations surrounding
male breadwinning (Townsend 2002). However, the growth in part-­time work has largely
been in involuntary part-­time work (Kalleberg
2000), and it has been accompanied by a decline in the gender gap in part-­time work, especially among parents.
Gender gaps in work hours, and changes in
them, are only relevant to the gender gap in
hourly pay if different work hours are associated with different levels of hourly pay. In this
regard, part-­time work often pays lower hourly
wages than full-­time work that is comparable
in terms of tasks and skill requirements (Kalle­
r s f : t h e ru s s e l l s a g e f o u n d at i o n j o u r n a l o f t h e s o c i a l s c i e n c e s
74
a h a lf cen t ury of ch a nge in t he li v es of a mer ica n women
berg 2000, 2011). Claudia Goldin (2014) argues
that pay is nonlinear with respect to hours in
many occupations, because hours are worth
more if they are worked continuously in long
blocks and if they are timed to overlap with the
hours of colleagues. Moreover, the relative pay
of different work hours is changing: for example, Cha and Weeden find that the hourly pay
of workers who put in fifty or more hours per
week has increased dramatically relative to full-­
time workers with similar observed attributes
(2014; see also Kuhn and Lozano 2008).
These wage disparities for different work
hours, when coupled with gender gaps in work
hours and trends in those hours that vary by
parental status, have potentially important implications for gender gaps in wages. First, in a
world in which mothers are more likely to work
part time and less likely to work long hours
than other groups, and in which fathers are
more likely to work long hours and less likely
to work part time, gender gaps in wages will be
greater among parents than among childless
adults merely because of differences in the relative pay of different work hours. Second, and
related, changes in the relative pay for part
time and long work hours will have stronger
associations with trends in the gender gap in
wages among parents than among childless
adults.
Wo r k H o u r s a n d t h e Fa m i ly
Wag e G a p
As we noted in our introductory comments, we
also wish to flip our comparisons around to
assess how trends in within-­gender family
wage differentials—the motherhood wage penalty and the fatherhood wage premium—are
associated with trends in work hours and in
the relative pay of different work hours. Research estimates that the motherhood wage
penalty is between 6 percent and 15 percent
per child, the higher estimates coming from
models that correct for differential selection of
mothers and childless women into paid labor
(Gangl and Ziefle 2009). Approximately one-­
third of the education-­adjusted motherhood
wage penalty disappears in models that also
adjust for work experience; much of the rest
is associated with the employment situation
of mothers after childbirth, especially their
greater likelihood of entering part-­time work.
Similarly, much of the fatherhood wage premium is associated with work hour behaviors:
when men become fathers, they increase their
paid work hours by an estimated forty hours
per child per year, and their hourly pay increases by about 4 percent per child (Lundberg
and Rose 2000; Glauber 2008).2
Unlike the literature on the gender gap in
wages, the literature on family wage gaps has
been less concerned with trends. Indeed, much
of it relies on longitudinal data from a single
cohort, using within-­person variation in pa­
rental status to estimate the “causal” effect of
having a child on wages. There are important
exceptions. For example, Markus Gangl and
Andrea Zeifle show that the motherhood wage
penalty was smaller for a cohort of women
born in the late 1950s than for a cohort born
in the early 1960s (2009). Sarah Avellar and Pamela Smock find no change in the motherhood
wage penalty between a cohort of women born
between 1944 and 1954 and another born between 1980 and 1984 (2003). However, Pal and
Waldfogel show a decline in the motherhood
wage penalty, from 6 to 1 percent, between 1993
and 2013 (this volume). Similarly, Shelly Lundberg and Elina Rose find a decline in the fatherhood wage premium between men born
between 1943 and 1950 and those born between
1951 and 1974 (2000).
Our goal is not to replicate these studies’
focus on identifying, to the extent possible
with observational data, the causal effect of parental status on wages. Rather, it is to describe
the empirical relationship between trends in
family wage gaps, changes in the distribution
of work hours between mothers and childless
women and between fathers and childless
2. Shelly Lundberg and Elina Rose (2000) report a nonlinear association between children and men’s work hours
and wages: the first child is associated with a large increase in hours and wages; the second, a smaller increase;
and subsequent children, no increase. Evidence of nonlinearities in the motherhood wage penalty is mixed (see,
for example, Gangl and Ziefle 2009). We focus on the average family wage differential for parents and childless
adults.
r s f : t h e ru s s e l l s a g e f o u n d at i o n j o u r n a l o f t h e s o c i a l s c i e n c e s
trends in the gender ga p
men, and changes in the wage returns to different work hours. We also take a more encompassing view of work hours than much of the
family wage gap literature, focusing on long
work hours as well as part-­time hours.
Data , Va r i a b le s , a n d M e t h o d s
We first describe, for each of our four gender
and parental status groups, trends in: wage and
salary employment; work hours, conditional
on employment; and the hourly wages associated with different levels of work hours, providing both unadjusted mean wages and mean
wages after adjusting for education, experience, and other standard wage predictors. We
then use a technique developed by Chinhui
Juhn, Kevin Murphy, and Brooks Pierce (1991)
to decompose trends in the gender gap in
wages within parental groups, and trends in
the family gap in wages within genders, into
changes that are generated by shifts in the
share of the relevant groups who work part
time, full time, or long work hours (the quantity
effect), and changes that are generated by shifts
in the relative wages of different work hours
(the price effect).
Data
The data for these analyses come from the May
(1969–1984) and Merged Outgoing Rotation
Groups, or MORG (1979–2014) of the Current
Population Survey files compiled and distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research.3 Our base analytic sample is limited to
noninstitutionalized civilian workers ages eighteen to sixty-­four years. Except for our analysis
of trends in wage and salary employment as a
share of the total population, we restrict the
sample to currently employed wage and salary
workers with nonmissing values on the parental status questions (see following section).
The multivariate analyses of wages further restrict the sample to workers with nonmissing
and nonzero hours with valid wage informa-
75
tion. Finally, the Juhn, Murphy, and Pierce
(JMP) decomposition analyses are further restricted to CPS years 1984 and 2014 or, for the
period-­specific decompositions, 1984, 1993,
2004, and 2014. The sample sizes differ across
analyses, and we present them in the notes to
the tables and figures. All analyses use the BLS-­
provided sampling weights.
Variables
The outcome variable in our analyses is hourly
wages. We estimate the hourly wages of workers who are not typically paid by the hour by
dividing weekly wages by the number of hours
usually worked per week. We exclude workers
whose hourly wages fall below $1 per hour or
more than $100 per hour in 1979 U.S. dollars,
and we multiply wages that are top-­coded by
the BLS to ensure confidentiality by 1.4 (Card
and DiNardo 2002). We adjust nominal wages
for inflation using the Bureau of Economic
Analysis’s Personal Consumption Expenditures Deflator, and express all wages in 2014
dollars. In the multivariate and decomposition
analyses, we take the natural log of hourly
wages (measured in pennies); in the bivariate
analyses, we keep wages in the natural metric
to ease interpretation.
We measure parental status with a binary
variable that we constructed from a CPS variable that indicates the number of children under the …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment