Motherhood: the main factor hampering attainment of gender pay equality in France

Women’s labor market situation has changed radically in the last 50 years. Their human capital (education plus experience) is now equal to men’s, and they have pulled ahead of men in educational attainment. But despite increasingly numerous, insistent laws and decrees requiring employers to eliminate disparities and discrimination, the gender pay gap remains extremely wide and is only narrowing slowly. On average, women still earn 20% less than men. Drawing on the DADS-EDP panel survey*, Dominique Meurs, an economist at the EconomiX research laboratory of the University of Paris-Nanterre and associated researcher at INED, and Pierre Pora, an economist and statistician at INSEE and CREST-affiliated researcher (Center for Research in Economics and Statistics), show that women’s labor market participation and the number of hours they work fall after the birth of a child while their progress up the wage scale slows. Motherhood is the main factor hampering and slowing the attainment of wage equality for women in France. 

*DADS (Déclarations Annuelles de Données Sociales, Annual labor data statements), long inaccessible to researchers, is an excellent source of precise data on both pay components and amounts of time worked, providing information from the year 1967 onward—France’s longest historical record on pay. 

In the 1970s, female labor market participation began accounting in large part for increases in the number and proportion of gainfully employed people in France. The proportion of women wage earners rose regularly, from 35% prior to 1970 to near parity (49%) in 2015. Women’s risk of unemployment likewise rose, joining men’s in the 2000s. However, the rate at which women as a proportion of full-time employees rose was slower than for all employees taken together and had only reached 36% in the private sector by the end of the period.

The convergence of male and female labor market participation behaviors did not work clearly to bring about the convergence of men’s and women’s earning levels that may have been expected. Prior to 1970, women’s average annual earnings (all income received for all hours worked in the given year) came to 60% of men’s; by 2015 the figure had risen to 73%. When both public and private-sector pay levels are considered, the male-female earnings disparity is somewhat less pronounced: 77% in 2015. High salaries show even wider gaps, though these have been continuously closing, particularly in the last few years—a reflection of the fact that women are gradually coming to occupy some of the highest-paid positions. 

“Human capital” is an economic term that encompasses both education/training and experience, with each of those factors having a positive effect on pay. Women’s human capital, after catching up with men’s, then pulled ahead, meaning that a higher proportion of women than men have a degree equal to or higher than the baccalauréat (French high school leaving diploma). And in the 2000s, more women than men had three years of higher education. Moreover, women’s and men’s “potential length of experience” (measured as the difference between an individual’s age and the estimated age—estimate based on the individual’s educational attainment—at which he or she entered the labor market) were practically the same at the end of the period. In sum, human capital differences between the sexes started ebbing away in the 1980s, after which the balance shifted in favor of women. The proportion of the gender pay gap due to human capital differences in favor of men therefore gradually diminished; then, in the late 1990s, it shifted in favor of women: among full-time employees, women’s human capital as measured by educational attainment and potential length experience, became, on average, greater than men’s. This in turn means that standard economic analyses of the gender pay gap phenomenon that explain it in terms of human capital differences (to the detriment of women) are simply not valid for the pay gaps observed. 

Generally speaking, the birth of a first child does not affect fathers’ total wage income, but this is hardly the case for women. First child’s arrival results in a relative decline in women’s total wage earnings of 40% in “year zero” (a decline related to maternity leave time), followed by a sustained penalty of around 30%. The cause of this considerable fall in women’s income can be broken down into three components: employment discontinuity, a sustained fall in number of paid hours, and an hourly wage penalty, which appears later and may be interpreted as the result of mothers being less present at work. This in turn can adversely affect career advancement and promotion prospects. The hourly wage penalty deepens over time; at the end of the period it amounted to approximately 20%.

Balancing family and work lives after the birth of a child is an exercise that varies by wage level and career prospects. The French institutional system also comes into play in occupational choices at that time. The prospect of paid parental leave starting with the first child—at a fixed rate of slightly under 600€ per month—is more attractive to near-minimum wage earners than parents in higher-paid jobs; conversely, parents with high salaries can more easily assume child care costs. This means that the total post-childbirth penalty is much heavier for low-wage earners. 

Dominique Meurs et Pierre Pora, 2019, « Égalité professionnelle entre les femmes et les hommes en France : une lente convergence freinée par les maternités », Économie et Statistique : 510-511-512 - 2019 [FR]

Online: February 2020