How Does the Gender Wage Gap Vary Over the Life Course and Across Cohorts?

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Nearly half a century after Britain's Equal Pay Act the convergence of men's and women's pay is slow and incomplete. Although the trend in the gender wage gap (GWG) is towards convergence, for any given birth cohort the GWG rises as people age from their twenties to mid-life, growing upon family formation. Thus, explanations of the GWG tend to focus on the time women spend away from paid work after childbirth and the difficulties they face in establishing their previous pay level on returning to the labour market. Pay penalties are particularly pronounced for women returning to part-time employment. Some people maintain that these patterns reflect women's preferences for work-life balance and conventional norms about the division of domestic labour, while others point to discriminatory practices in the workplace.By analysing nationally representative cohort data for people born in Britain in 1958, 1970 and 1989/90 this study addresses three gaps in knowledge. First, evidence will be extended to wages and employment at later ages than has been studied hitherto. Second, it will be extended backwards to explore linkages from childhood years to labour market experience, making innovative use of under-utilised material including biometric indicators. Third, we will be able to distinguish between the effects of ageing and of having been born male or female at different points in history. This is something that is only possible with data tracking more than one cohort. There are three reasons to anticipate cohort effects:(i) People born at different times are exposed to different labour market and policy conditions during their lifetimes. For instance, the 1958 cohort left school when the Equal Pay and other Equal Opportunities provisions were first being implemented whereas these had been in place for a decade when the 1970 cohort finished school. (ii) The education gap between men and women has disappeared and even reversed, such that the pay-off due to qualifications will have shifted markedly between men and women across the generations. (iii) Attitudes to women's participation in the labour market and to men's in domestic labour have shifted. These changes in social norms, together with attendant changes in public policy, have created opportunities for men and women to combine paid work, parenthood and leisure in ways not hitherto possible, with uncertain consequences for the life choices and earnings patterns of men and women across the life course. The study will address five related questions: 1. What does the GWG look like over the life course and across birth cohorts? Does it change later in life and how does it compare across cohorts for people at the same points in their life? 2. How much of the GWG is accounted for by differences in human capital (qualifications and work experience) accumulated over the life course? How different does the course of the wage gap look across ages for men and women with similar human capital attributes?3. What role do parenthood and caring responsibilities play in the emergence of differences between men and women in employment and pay and how the GWG persists over the life-course? 4. How much of the GWG is attributable to the sorts of jobs undertaken by men and women, particularly in respect of occupation and part-time hours? 5. What role do childhood attributes and experiences play in determining the subsequent GWG and do childhood influences still matter having accounted for early adulthood experiences? The study will provide a comprehensive anatomy of the GWG across individuals' life-times, up to the age of 61 in the case of the 1958 cohort, and across three generations with births spanning 40 years, offering numerous insights into wage formation which will assist in efforts to mitigate the consequences of unequal treatment in the past and promote gender equality in the present and future.