Study: Mandatory leave laws stalled narrowing of gender pay gap
Without leave laws, researchers say much of wage gap could have been eliminated by 2017
After major gains occurred in the 1980s in erasing a persistent gap between the wages of women and men, the convergence of wages suddenly stalled during the 1990s and beyond, and now a new paper has pinpointed what its authors believe is the culprit: various mandatory federal and state family and medical leave laws.
The paper, “Why Did Gender Wage Convergence in the United States Stall,” by Harvard professor Peter Blair and St. Bonaventure professor Benjamin Posmanick, and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that in the decade before the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was enacted in 1993, the wage gap between white women and white men in the U.S. declined by approximately 1 percent per year but, in the decade afterward, the rate fell to less than one-third of that.
The rate of convergence for black women to white men fell from 0.3 percent per year in the decade before the law to .05 percent after.
By examining wages before and after passage of not only the FMLA but similar state laws in 12 states, the authors found the leave policies explained 94 percent of the reduction in the rate of gender wage convergence. The researchers took care to control for changes in other observable characteristics of workers, for instance age and education, among others.
They also concluded that, if gender wage convergence had continued at the pre-family leave rate, wage parity between white women and white men would have been achieved as early as 2017.