Abstract
By now the facts governing gender labor market outcomes are well known: Women earn less than men, work in different occupations, and major in less market oriented fields. Over the life cycle, women’s wages rise less quickly, but are fairly comparable at least initially when both men and women start working. Being married is associated with lower wages for women, but higher wages for men, yet single men and women fare almost equally. Children exacerbate the male-female wage gap, so that wage differentials are higher among married men and women the greater the family size. Husbands and wives typically have large wage differences in families with large child age disparities than when families are completed in short periods of time. Finally, women commute less to work, work fewer hours, and tend to be more intermittent in the labor force than men. Indeed many of these patterns date as far back as written records.2
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Polachek, S.W., Siebert, W.S. (1996). Family Labor Market Incentives: Men and Women Working for Pay. In: Menchik, P.L. (eds) Household and Family Economics. Recent Economic Thought Series, vol 51. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5384-3_8
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